Applications can be thought of as living and evolving pieces of your organization. They are unique, constantly changing and running everywhere. From the time they are written by developers, to being tested, deployed and finally hitting runtime, the application journey leaves room for increased attack surface. Let's explore how you can you keep yourself at lockstep with securing apps with these three must-dos:

1. Secure the workloads that apps run on

Protecting workloads is the most dynamic way to ensure security for applications and the environments that run them. Cisco Secure Workload protects your applications by generating app behavior- driven policies and enforces it across any multi-cloud environment.

2. Secure access to apps across all users and devices

This is critical for all organizations to guarantee integrity of all users and devices that access their applications.  Cisco's Duo Beyond enables you to establish user-device trust and secure access to applications. This helps you identify corporate versus personal devices with easy certificate deployment, block untrusted endpoints, and give users secure access to internal applications without using VPN.

3. Monitor how apps perform, to detect and remediate anomalies

Take advantage of application performance monitoring tools to give your organization visibility to applications functions to manage any sudden anomalies at runtime. Cisco AppDynamics is a leading application performance monitoring solution providing deep insight into transaction behavior and metrics for applications running in public and private cloud environments. Having this insight will let you and your teams stay ahead of any unpredictable cases including potential security threats.

While there are many solutions out there to prevent threats at different points of your organization, securing applications requires new thinking and unique set of solutions that remain continuous as the applications evolve. Cisco App-First Security brings together a comprehensive set of proucts that help your developer and security teams deliver together. The best way to learn more about these products is to try their free trials, Duo and AppD are offering them now.

In addition, Cisco DevNet gives you plenty of help for your learning journey. The new DevNet learning track and accompanying DevNet Sandbox give you a hands-on, immersive experience. You can also find docs and other resources on the new Cisco Application-First Security website.