Applications must be reimagined — here’s why, and how

No matter what product or service a company offers, digital technology is critical to its operations and its interactions with customers. The quality of that digital interaction will be a significant factor in customer perceptions of the company, and a key differentiator.

Giving customers a good digital experience is now essential for business success and the applications that underpin customers’ digital experience must be easy to use, always available and secure.

Also, the efficiency with which a company operates internally is today heavily dependent on the applications it uses in every aspect of its operations. Applications underpin how services are delivered and consumed. It is through applications that companies build a relationship between their brand and their customers. In other words, applications ARE the business. However, with the rapid pace of technology evolution every organisation faces challenges to continuously optimise these applications, respond to user feedback, incorporate and exploit the latest developments in software technologies, ensure the optimal performance and efficiency of its applications, and serve a user base – employees and customer alike – that is increasingly mobile.

Organisations must achieve these goals for an ever-increasing number of applications that must interact efficiently and remain secure in the face of increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Several studies show that over the next few years, 500 million new applications are being written, almost exclusively for the cloud model.

Meeting these challenges requires a new approach to application development, deployment and support. It requires the reimagining of applications: transforming or reinventing applications to securely improve their functionality, user experience, and business value. Reimagining applications makes them more competitive, more valuable, and more closely aligned with the needs of users and stakeholders without compromising on their security.

Reimagining Applications with Cisco

Cisco is at the forefront of reimaging applications with a range of technologies that enable organisations to meet the many challenges of reimagining applications, and gain maximum competitive advantage from them. Three of the most important are:

• Cisco Cloud Native Application Observability
• Cisco Full-Stack Observability
• Cisco Business Risk Observability

Here’s how they help organisations reimagine their applications.

Cisco Full-Stack Observability

Cisco Full-Stack Observability helps IT departments identify and remedy performance issues, optimise resources and strengthen application security. By bringing together data from multiple domains it enables organisations to gain unified visibility, drive real-time insights and recommend actions to deliver optimal and secure experiences.

It enables application development and IT operations teams to move beyond siloed, domain-specific monitoring. It brings visibility, insights and actions together for teams across multiple domains and helps them optimise root cause analysis, application security, team alignment and more.

Cisco is enhancing its full-stack observability offer by integrating application performance and network intelligence data to provide visibility from applications to the network. This will help users gain deeper insight into networks and applications and understand how applications, hybrid cloud and internet performance affect user experience. It will also help them correlate business results with application, network and internet performance.

Cisco Cloud Native Application Observability

Cloud Native Application Observability helps customers achieve business outcomes, make the right digital experience-related decisions, ensure performance meets end user expectations, and reduce risk while securing workloads.

It comprises a number of modules.

Cost Insights: provides visibility and insights into application-level costs alongside performance metrics to help businesses understand the fiscal impact of their cloud applications. It leverages advanced analytics and automation to identify and eliminate unnecessary costs and supports sustainability efforts.

Application Resource Optimizer: provides deeper insights into a Kubernetes workload and provides visibility into the workload’s resource utilisation. It helps identify the best candidates for optimisation, and helps reduce resource utilisation. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to create a utilisation baseline, and offer and recommend improvements. It analyses and optimises application workloads to maximise resource usage and reduce excessive cloud spending.

Security Insights: provides insights into cloud native infrastructure insights to locate threats and vulnerabilities. It also provides runtime data security to detect and protect against leakage of sensitive data, and business risk prioritisation for cloud security. By integrating features from Cisco security solutions it gives security and application teams expanded threat visibility, and insights into business risk insights to enable them to respond in real-time to revenue-impacting security risks and reduce their organisation’s overall risk profile.

Cisco AIOps: helps to bring together and visualise contextualised data relevant to infrastructure, network, incidents and performance of a business application, all in one place. It simplifies and optimises the IT operations needs and accelerates time-to market for customer-specific AIOps capabilities and requirements.

Cisco Business Risk Observability

Business Risk Observability helps organisations become more resilient against growing attacks by enabling teams to generate an application-based business risk score for vulnerabilities in applications or services that have a high likelihood of exploitation, enabling remediation of these to be prioritised.

Applications Re-imagined at Cisco Live

Cisco Live! in Las Vegas in June 2023 put the spotlight on the Cisco tools that help organisations reimagine applications. All the sessions are now available on demand here.

Cisco, along with the Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco Emerging Technology & Incubation teams showed how Cisco Full-Stack Observability can delivers always-on, secure and exceptional digital experiences: what it means, how it works and how it helps operations teams with end-to-end observability.

There were real use cases of Cisco Business Risk Observability, customer digital experience monitoring using Cisco Full-Stack Observability and details of business solutions developed with partners that use these tools to support, accelerate and drive business outcomes.