Panoptica: A Holistic Cloud Native Application Security Solution for Enterprises

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Idan Kober
Tuesday, Jun 6th, 2023

Outshift by Cisco is paving the way with “DevOps-friendly” cloud native security solutions that fundamentally simplify conventional offerings. Today we are excited to announce the launch of Panoptica, our cloud native application security solution, designed to holistically secure the software development lifecycle (SDLC) from end to end.  

At Cisco, the Panoptica solution is being reimagined from the ground up to meet the current and forward-looking security needs of modern enterprise applications. We are now combining the collective strengths of its current capabilities with additional organic development to transform Panoptica into a complete cloud native security solution that enforces stringent risk-based assessments and policy-based security controls into every phase of the SDLC—from development through runtime.  

Today, cloud security is top of mind for every chief information security officer (CISO) and DevOps leader. Your experience working with multiple cloud security vendors has likely resulted in an excess amount of budgetary investment into multiple cloud security point products. Due to the tool sprawl resulting from this, your Information Technology (IT) security and DevOps teams are ostensibly struggling with the integration complexities that arise from making multiple tools work together. In addition, your compliance teams are likely evaluating whether your application development processes are compliant with global and federal mandates. And not least of all, you are trying your best to ensure that security is always at the heart of every software application-based service you offer to your customers.  

Comprehensive Cloud Native Application Security by Cisco

Cisco has entered the cloud native security market to tangibly lift each modern application security obstacle enterprises face every day. Using SaaS-based implementation, Panoptica is available as a simple, user-based license-activated security solution that natively integrates with the toolsets your DevOps teams already use.  

Advance to DevSecOps with Panoptica 

In cloud-native application development, while cloud-based workloads significantly reduce the speed of innovation for your DevOps teams, they complicate security for your SecOps teams by introducing new attack vectors at every stage of the lifecycle.  

Our Panoptica solution provides contextualized cloud security to identify, prioritize, and remediate security risks, vulnerabilities, and misconfigurations in complex cloud environments. From software, artifact, and exposure scanning Infrastructure as Code (IaC), to Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Application Programming Interface (API) security, comprehensive Cloud Workload Protection (CWP) across multi-cloud runtime environments, and attack path analysis, which consolidates findings from all the aforementioned cloud security toolsets to combat alert fatigue—Panoptica offers a wide range of capabilities CISOs, DevOps, and Security teams need to protect their modern application stack using a single simplified solution. Panoptica is also an integration-ready solution. Besides seamlessly integrating with the CI/CD toolchains DevOps already use, it also offers integrated full-stack observability and advanced vulnerability management capabilities.  

Key Solution Highlights 

Ready to go over some key solution highlights? Let’s begin. 

Key Solution Highlights

Tighter CI/CD Security Controls:

With Panoptica, application developers stay compliant with federal mandates by easily generating a software bill of materials (SBOM) to identify open-source software and artifacts that may be vulnerable to attacks and require patching. Additionally, Panoptica shifts security testing to the left by enabling application developer teams to scan their infrastructure-as-code (IaC) templates and scripts for potential security risks and misconfigurations before deploying them to production. 

Comprehensive Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM):

Panoptica provides continuous visibility and monitoring of Kubernetes clusters for security risks and compliance violations. Our KSPM capability uses contextual mapping to identify the relationships between Kubernetes objects and provide an accurate and up-to-date view of the cluster's security posture. By scanning multi-cloud Kubernetes workloads for vulnerabilities and common misconfigurations, Panoptica provides actionable insights from its dashboards. It enables declarative policy automation where you only need to write one access or permissions policy to propagate it across clusters. 

Next-Level Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) At Scale:

Panoptica takes CSPM to the next level by delivering continuous cloud security compliance at scale, including attack path analysis that highlights potential attack chains. Whether an AWS (Amazon Web Services), Azure, GCP (Google Cloud Platform), Kubernetes, or a hybrid configuration—Panoptica scans, monitors, and instantly remediates your cloud stack to ensure it aligns with compliance requirements. While surfacing relevant compliance benchmarks, Panoptica helps you visualize, sort, and group your assets easily to get full visibility into your entire inventory of cloud assets. 

Streamlined and Consolidated Cloud Workload Protection (CWP):

Enterprises can only secure what they see, and for that, they need comprehensive visibility across all cloud native workloads and applications. Offering comprehensive security controls, Panoptica extends cloud native security coverage across multiple cloud native workloads including virtual machines (VMs), containerized microservices and Kubernetes orchestration, as well as serverless functions, thereby eliminating the need for disjointed point solutions. Panoptica provides visibility and remediation guidance for applications running on virtual machines (VMs), for microservices running in containers and managed by Kubernetes, and for event-based microservices that use ephemeral serverless functions to perform highly specific roles within an application. Panoptica’s scanning capabilities inspect workloads for vulnerabilities and ranks them by a risk score to ensure up-to-date coverage.  

Robust API Security:

Panoptica helps discover API endpoints giving Ops teams a clear picture of all API connections—including segmented views of internal and external APIs.  Panoptica analyzes and scores OpenAPI/REST-based APIs from a security perspective, and then presents these to developers and SecOps as a curated list so that they can quickly make compliant API selections to embed security into their microservices from the beginning.  Panoptica monitors the APIs for vulnerabilities in runtime to ensure their compliance with your declarative policies. 

One-of-a-Kind Attack Path Analysis Engine:

Panoptica’s proprietary attack path analysis engine quickly and accurately discovers and helps remediate exploitable attack vectors in your cloud stack. Using techniques such as comprehensive attack path analysis, root cause analysis, and dynamic remediation, you can now uncover new and known risks by looking through the lens of a potential attacker. SecOps teams can use attack path analysis to surface critical attack paths to better understand the impact of potential risks. 

Final Thoughts 

Panoptica by Cisco is our answer to the enterprise market’s need for a simple and fresh approach to cloud native application security. As your DevOps workflows mature in their cloud native development journey, consider our simple yet comprehensive approach to securing modern apps. One that provides holistic protection to your application development—from development through runtime—from a SaaS-based “single pane of glass” security engine.  
 
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