Show Risk Burndown with the Code to Cloud Dashboard

Oct 31, 2023
6 minutes
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The barrage of high-priority alerts keeps security teams focused on the frontlines. Meanwhile, at the strategic level, CISOs and board members require a comprehensive view of their organization's risk posture and the effectiveness of their cybersecurity initiatives. The occasional handoff of metrics snapshots or lists of resolved alerts falls short of providing the timely insights leadership needs to make informed decisions.

As a result, security practitioners find themselves manually compiling reports — extracting data, transferring it to spreadsheets, loading it into external dashboards. The labor-intensive process not only consumes valuable time but also leaves organizations in the dark about the current state of their security programs.

Recognizing this gap, Palo Alto Networks set out to solve it. The recent Darwin release of Prisma Cloud unveils a solution designed to empower your security teams and deliver the actionable insights your leadership demands. The Code to Cloud™ Dashboard allows you to stay proactive versus getting caught off guard by the latest threat to emerge.

Executive Reporting When You Need It

A reactive posture isn’t an option. Not in today’s sophisticated, high-stakes environments. An effective defense strategy hinges on the ability to make swift, informed decisions. Prisma Cloud’s Code to Cloud Dashboard isn't merely a convenience — it's the differentiator for CISOs and leadership teams, offering insights previously buried in data silos or lost in translation.

Consider the pivotal events on a CISO's calendar — the quarterly reviews, strategy meetings, unexpected crises. The questions that arise on these occasions aren’t solely about metrics but about direction and strategy.

  • How is risk evolving across each stage of our software application lifecycle?
  • How effective is our cloud security program?
  • Have we taken action to lower risk to business-critical applications?
  • Which business units or applications inherit the most risk?

The Code to Cloud Dashboard answers crucial questions, not in hours or days but in context of real-time statuses.

Prisma Cloud goes beyond providing data to offering organizations a roadmap. By pinpointing areas of concern and highlighting opportunities for improvement, it empowers CISOs to lead with confidence, ensuring that their strategies remain data-driven, agile and aligned with the organization's broader goals.

Up-to-the-Minute Monitoring Meets Quantifiable Metrics

The Code to Cloud Dashboard isn't just a monitoring tool. It's an analytics powerhouse. It provides insights across each stage of the software development lifecycle — code, build, deploy, and run.

Dashboard displaying the latest event stream, bringing the most urgent issues to your attention
Figure 1: Dashboard displaying the latest event stream, bringing the most urgent issues to your attention

Prisma Cloud processes over 1 trillion events globally each day. This includes cloud configuration changes, network flows, detected incidents and more across the application lifecycle. As the platform processes new events, the Latest Events ticker in the Code to Cloud Dashboard continuously updates users with critical risks and urgent incidents. As you can see in figure 1, the dashboard's top section streams events, offering a continuous pulse check on your cloud environment.

The Shift-Left Paradigm in Action

Enabling early detection of security issues at the infrastructure-as-code stage, the dashboard makes shift left security possible. As you move from runtime to code, you'll notice a trend — the number of code errors decreases, signaling your organization's shift towards a prevention-first design.

 Prisma Cloud's Code to Cloud intelligence isolates the most critical security issues across the app lifecycle, allowing teams to focus on issues that matter most and confirm risk posture trends
Figure 2: Prisma Cloud's Code to Cloud intelligence isolates the most critical security issues across the app lifecycle, allowing teams to focus on issues that matter most and confirm risk posture trends

As practitioners remediate alerts and vulnerabilities, they can easily quantify and showcase the progress of alerts their teams are burning down in the middle three pillars. Starting from runtime, users see the urgent incidents and attack paths effectively remedied.

Now that users understand their overall security risk posture, the second problem arises: How can management hold teams accountable for resolving security issues? Visibility into security risk has little advantage over unresolved alerts in the absence of accountability.

Driving Accountability Through Informed Oversight

Think of visibility without accountability like a ship without a rudder — directionless and prone to drift. The Code to Cloud Dashboard allows you to define applications, business units or teams and assign owners to resolve identified risks. By attaching owners to risks, you ensure that visibility goes hand in hand with responsibility. Empowering your teams with actionable insights guides them in addressing potential issues, rather than passively monitoring the situation.

Now you can identify which business units or teams excel in security practices and which require support
Figure 3: Now you can identify which business units or teams excel in security practices and which require support

But actionable intelligence goes beyond team accountability, extending into resource allocation and performance in specific areas, such as incident response and compliance. Consider the breadth of intel that can shape an organization's security posture as management queries timely data, asking questions like:

  • Are engineering teams introducing more or less risks in development MOM and QOQ?
  • Which teams are consistently meeting their security KPIs?
  • Are there areas where we're consistently failing compliance checks? How can we preemptively address these issues before they escalate?
  • Where do our security investments yield the most significant returns, and where are they falling short?
  • Which business units are most frequently targeted, and what patterns can we discern from these attacks?

Presented with timely knowledge via the Code to Cloud Dashboard security teams can easily understand their overall cloud risk posture and routinely share key insights with leadership. Learning that a specific business unit faces consistent threats, leadership may decide to allocate more resources, such as additional practitioners or specialized training.

Learn More

Prisma Cloud’s Code to Cloud Dashboard offers a single lens through which you can view, analyze, and act on your cloud security posture. Unparalleled visibility and control eliminate the distraction of noise and the guesswork sometimes associated with management reviews. The industry’s first code-to-cloud dashboard tracks your risk reduction from the prevention of code errors to the mitigation of runtime vulnerabilities, allowing you to quantify resources saved and advancement of business goals.

Tune in to our on-demand webinar, CNAPP Supercharged: A Radically New Approach to Cloud Security, to learn about Prisma Cloud's latest innovations and how to streamline app lifecycle protection. And don’t miss an opportunity to test drive best-in-class code-to-cloud security with a 30-day Prisma Cloud trial.


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