Cisco AppDynamics software melds security, application management

Cisco AppDynamics is making it easier for customers to integrate security features with application development to help customers detect threats, identify non-standard application behavior, and block attacks.

The company is adding software, called Cisco Secure Application, to the AppDynamics platform to correlate security and application information by scanning code execution for known exploits. Vulnerability data is shared with application and security operations teams so that together they can prioritize, execute, and track remediation efforts.

Applications are growing exponentially, but they’re no longer hosted in a single data center. They’re distributed, run on private premise or in multicloud locations. The ability to ensure security, detect problems, and quickly fix them is more important than ever, said AppDynamics’ CTO Gregg Ostrowski. Secure Application provides visibility into individual lines of code regardless of where the application is hosted or traffic originated, he said.

Another key to Secure Application is that it helps get the security and devops teams working together with an AppDynamic system they’re already using and familiar with, Ostrowski said.

The AppDynamics performance-management platform uses a series of agents and controllers to monitor the performance of application code, runtime, and behavior. Agents are deployed across the enterprise, from devices to containers and host application locations. The system uses AI and machine learning to correlate information from across different domains to better understand application performance and infrastructure dependencies and quickly identify problems. The system supports analytics to help IT teams understand why things are not working optimally and to predict when problems will occur.

“Secure Application can identify abnormal behavior and detect exploits in real-time — a far cry from the status quo where hackers spend months inside an application’s environment undetected — and can automatically enforce security policies to block the threats,” wrote Jina Na, a product marketer with AppDynamics, in a blog about the new application. “In the event of a breach, Secure Application immediately notifies relevant parties and provides rich details, including in familiar AppDynamics dashboards, on where to quickly respond and remediate.”

Secure Application also includes access to Cisco security research that it uses to automatically detect and block malicious actors trying to breach the application, Na stated.

AppDynamics with Cisco Secure Application is available for trials.