Jyoti Bansal founded AppDynamics, a company that Cisco bought in 2017 for $3.7 billion. He might have been content to rest on that big win, but instead he went on to launch Harness and a venture capital arm, Unusual Ventures. Today, he announced his newest company called Traceable, which attacks security at the code level. Bansal says that security has traditionally looked at protecting the network and hardware, but today the attack surface is more at the software level, and that's why he decided to start another company. "The software is becoming the primary attack vector for a lot of things. If you look at most of the sophisticated data breaches […], they are happening in the code, not in the network or the infrastructure anymore," he explained.

Traceable, a startup developing an end-to-end cloud app security solution, today emerged from stealth with $20 million in venture equity financing. Newly flush with capital, CEO Jyoti Bansal intends to focus on acquiring customers globally while growing Traceable's team and accelerating R&D. Cloud-native apps are often built with hundreds or even thousands of API microservices (i.e., loosely coupled services), making them difficult to protect at scale. Gartner predicts that by 2022, API abuses will be the most frequent attack vector, which isn't surprising considering API calls represented 83% of web traffic as of 2018. Traceable ostensibly protects these APIs with machine learning algorithms that analyze app activity from the user and the session all the way down to the code.

Before and even more so now during the pandemic, CIOs and IT leaders are managing new capacity increases, security demands, and, in some cases critical, life-saving applications. It is essential how optimized technological performance enables the digital applications that power daily lives. AppDynamics, a Cisco company, helps companies around the world power their complex multi-cloud environments, through application performance management (APM) and Artificial Intelligence for IT operations (AIOps). I asked Luke Rogers, Area VP, Canada, AppDynamics, how COVID-19 has impacted businesses. "The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed our everyday interactions and how companies operate," replied Rogers.

AppDynamics is an application performance monitoring solution that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to provide real-time visibility and insight into IT environments. With our unique AIOps solution, you can take the right action at exactly the right time with automated anomaly detection, rapid root-cause analysis, and a unified view of your entire application ecosystem, including private and public clouds. Using AppDynamics, you'll finally align IT, DevOps, and the business around the information that helps you protect your bottom line and deliver flawless customer experiences at scale. We are looking for a Lead Site Reliability Engineer to join our SaaS Ops Engineering team maintaining our customer platform. This is a unique opportunity where you will get a chance to work in a high-growth environment, learn new technologies, and tackle mission-critical technical challenges at scale.

Enterprises that are betting the massive amounts of data that they are collecting will deliver the insights they need to make better and faster businesses are finding that they could just as easily be overwhelmed by them. The data is coming at them fast from their core datacenters, cloud infrastructure, and the edge, and the applications that are generating it changing even faster, far outpacing the ability for humans to manage it all. Automation is not new to the IT sector, but artificial intelligence – and particularly machine learning techniques – are increasingly being leveraged by organizations to keep up with the increasing rate of change, leading to the rise of the new trend – and new buzzword – of AIOps, using AI and machine learning to automate IT operations. Most enterprises are expected to adopt these new technologies and adapt to the fast-evolving IT landscape with staffs that probably haven't grown much if at all over the past several years. "What we see is that IT is facing a tremendous challenge as far as the environment through which they are trying to build to support their applications," Matt Chotin, senior director of technology strategy at AppDynamics, tells The Next Platform.

Machine learning has the potential to transform the way organisations interact with the world, to move faster and to provide better customer experience. But while machine learning's long-term potential certainly looks bright, its adoption in the enterprise may advance more slowly than originally thought. Part of the challenge is a lack of understanding around what machine learning is. Machine learning is an application or subset of AI, which is generally thought of as higher-order decision-making intelligence. Machine learning is really about applying mathematics to different domains.

Earlier this year, Cisco announced the acquisition of AppDynamics – uniquely positioning Cisco to enable enterprises to accelerate their digital transformations by actively monitoring, analyzing and optimizing complex application environments at scale. Today, we are excited to announce the intent to acquire Perspica, the first acquisition to support and accelerate the AppDynamics vision. In our experience working with the world's largest companies, we know that machine learning is only as good as the data it ingests; only as relevant as the data's timeliness; and only as valuable as the data's business context. Cisco's AppDynamics data sets span wherever the application components are deployed, and there is a massive opportunity to correlate this with user experience and business context. With the addition of Perspica to our AppDynamics capabilities, customers will be able to further take advantage of machine learning capabilities to analyze large amounts of application-related data, in real time and with business context, including when an application is deployed in a company's public, private and multiple cloud environments.

Earlier this year, Cisco announced the acquisition of AppDynamics – uniquely positioning Cisco to enable enterprises to accelerate their digital transformations by actively monitoring, analyzing and optimizing complex application environments at scale. Today, we are excited to announce the intent to acquire Perspica, the first acquisition to support and accelerate the AppDynamics vision. In our experience working with the world's largest companies, we know that machine learning is only as good as the data it ingests; only as relevant as the data's timeliness; and only as valuable as the data's business context. Cisco's AppDynamics data sets span wherever the application components are deployed, and there is a massive opportunity to correlate this with user experience and business context. With the addition of Perspica to our AppDynamics capabilities, customers will be able to further take advantage of machine learning capabilities to analyze large amounts of application-related data, in real time and with business context, including when an application is deployed in a company's public, private and multiple cloud environments.

We have known for some time that the number of signals coming from your IT systems surpassed the ability for humans to keep track of them years ago. Machines can help and have been for some time. The advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning has accelerated that ability and today, Cisco announced that it is using these technologies to help customers find failures before they become major issues. Cisco's solutions are similar to others out there using AI and machine learning to help augment humans' ability to sift through the mass of information being thrown at us by these systems. The company is introducing two new sets of services to address this need.

Startup Instana, which has quietly been developing application performance management (APM) tools for containers and microservices, is officially releasing its first commercial offering this week, adding artificial intelligence and automation into the DevOps process. The company is detailing the product -- also called Instana -- at Dockercon Europe on Tuesday. The goal is to speed-up the development, testing, deployment and maintenance of new applications, especially those applications deployed in containers or through microservices, as enterprises move toward their goal of digital transformation. "The digitization or digital transformation trend that is going on is not about being big, it's simply about being fast," Pete Abrams, the co-founder and COO of Instana, told Enterprise Cloud News before the October 17 launch. "The people that can code-up, deploy and operate new business services the fastest are showing themselves to be the winner, and that is a massive competitive advantage."