Noel Bezuidenhout, Senior Pre-sales Solutions Engineer, Makwa IT

In today’s fast-paced, cloud-focused world, applications are a critical part of business functionality. As the need for accelerated application delivery across multiple environments, including on-premise, public cloud and multicloud, has increased, so too have both the dangers and the attack surface, across the application lifecycle.

As this complexity continues to mount, suggests Noel Bezuidenhout, Senior Pre-sales Solutions Engineer at Makwa IT, the need for application and security teams to work together with shared tools to maximise productivity and minimise business risk has increased exponentially.

Business risk observability (BRO) is crucial in these circumstances, he adds, as it allows IT teams to pinpoint the root causes of application health and security issues, especially those from third-party APIs, right down to the code level, and in real-time.

“BRO is all about adding business context to an organisation’s security vulnerabilities and capabilities. With Cisco’s Full Stack Observability tool, organisations are able to move beyond traditional barriers or boundaries, towards a more proactive security posture, based on business risk,” he explains.

“Crucially, it allows security teams to decide on how best to tackle these risks, thanks to a score-carding methodology that allows them to quickly ascertain the severity of each issue, in relation to its impact on the business. In this way, they can rapidly determine which are the biggest risks and prioritise these for remediation.”

Bezuidenhout suggests that this approach is moving away from the traditional operations-centric business methodology, towards a more strategic one that incorporates a company’s business-critical apps. After all, he says, if these fail or are targeted by bad actors, this will significantly impact the company’s revenue, along with the market sentiment. In other words, it can not only cause financial damage, but also reputational damage.

“Traditionaly, if outages or hackers impact a business, several different business teams are drawn in to resolve this problem. For example, an incident may require the network, application, VMware and security teams all to be involved, but if these teams remain siloed, it will lead to a lot of time being lost before remediation occurs.

“Cisco Full Stack Observability is a single solution that not only breaks these siloes and connects the teams horizontally across the business, but also provides a comprehensive view and scorecard to determine what must be prioritised. Moreover, it offers insights from multiple global sources and takes into account learnings from international experiences with these threats.”

He notes that Makwa IT, which has numerous key clients in the financial sector, is one of the youngest Cisco Gold partners in South Africa, and the company’s strategy includes becoming a key player in the Full Stack Observability category.

“Our role involves taking Cisco’s BRO offering to our partners and giving them the ability and capability in their business to boost security and application-monitoring, ensuring that they don’t become victims of malicious parties. For us, it’s all about making certain that when bad actors make such attempts, our clients can not only quickly prevent this, but remain assured that their revenue and reputation remain intact.

“There are many benefits to BRO, but I would suggest that business continuity is probably the number one advantage. If you’re able to ensure your business can continue operating without interruption in a multi-platform world, there’s no doubt that both your reputation and revenue will improve. Moreover, this solution also serves as a form of defence because its proactive warning system, and score-carding to allow for prioritisation, means you’re able to respond faster and more effectively.

This, naturally, offers greater safeguards for to both your business, and those of your customers,” he concludes.

For a consultation with a pre-sales engineer from Makwa-IT: info@makwa-it.com