In a bid to explore new frontiers in cloud through research, open-source project contributions and new software development, Cisco Systems Inc. created Outshift out of its existing incubation operation.

The first fruit of that endeavor, Panoptica, is a Kubernetes-native platform that secures the cloud-native application development cycle from code to cloud.

“To us in Outshift, it’s like you are looking at a world where every modern application is a disintegration of services brought together,” said Vijoy Pandey (pictured), senior vice president of Outshift at Cisco. “How do you ensure security? The only way of doing it is to look at securing how you build your application, securing what you’ve built and securing where you run them the entire lifecycle.”

Pandey spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and John Furrier at Cisco Live, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Cisco’s approach to app lifecycle management and security.

Accounting for multi-level vulnerabilities

The bad guys don’t really favor any particular kind of vulnerability. They’re just looking for any exploitable weakness within an infrastructure. As a standalone product, Panoptica stays ahead of the problem with its end-to-end capabilities — covering areas from runtime to deployment, according to Pandey.

“It does everything from how, what and where in the application security space with the context and prioritization of attack parts,” he said. “Now, Panoptica is also tackling runtime security, deploy time security, as well as develop time security because, again, it needs to be end to end. You can’t just look at runtime and forget about the developers. That’s where the friction is.”

One major challenge in developing a platform like Panoptica has been accounting for the various stakeholders involved in the typical software lifecycle, from developers to cloud platform engineers and security practitioners, Pandey added.

“You go from developers who are looking at how you build the app. You’re looking at SRE and cloud platform engineers who are like, ‘What is being built?’ — serverless containers and so on,” he said. “And you’re looking at SecOps; they’re looking at cloud resources and identities and who has access to what.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Cisco Live:

Photo: SiliconANGLE