Securing physical data centers on physical hosts was a very different game than today’s task of securing the increasingly abstract attack surface across modern, cloud-native applications. As speed of deployment and ease of scale take center stage, application security must be addressed from the get-go, or developers risk leaving an open door that potentially exposes a treasure trove of data to cyber theft.

“Applications were always the target du jour, and they will continue to be because as engineers code even faster, they leave security behind,” said Chetan Conikee (pictured), founder and chief technology officer ShiftLeft Inc.

Conikee spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Joep Piscaer (@jpiscaer), technical pathfinder, cloud and infrastructure, at Jumbo Supermarkten and blogger at VirtualLifestyle.nl, during the .NEXT Conference in London. They discussed how ShiftLeft protects cloud-native applications with help from the Nutanix Xi Epoch multicloud application observation and monitoring tool. (* Disclosure below.)

Addressing security early and often

ShiftLeft was founded in 2016 to address the vulnerabilities inherent within cloud-native applications, specifically the early stages of the software development cycle. Securing microservices and applications within the cloud, the company’s software addresses security issues on a continual basis as opposed to reacting to threats as they are discovered.

“The core ethos of ShiftLeft is observing; observing threats in realtime and observing vulnerabilities that might exist in code,” Conikee stated. “We have built a system that in a matter of minutes converts code to a graph … almost like a social network graph except that it’s connecting all the functions and variables in your code that represent the application, [and] using that graph, we extract vulnerabilities that might exist in the code.”

An autonomous agent then takes the data extracted during coding and protects the application in run time from imminent threats.

ShiftLeft is cloud-native, with infrastructure deployed on Amazon Web Services, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Looking for a product that would work within its multi-hybrid cloud ecosystem, the company decided early on to adopt Netsil, which has evolved to become Nutanix’s Xi Epoch.

ShiftLeft’s system is comprised of a dense microservice mesh. This makes the company’s internal security watch as critical as the service it provides to clients; if one microservice is down, it impacts a set of other microservices, which in turn impacts the customer.  The cloud map feature of Nutanix Xi Epoch can dynamically plot ShiftLeft’s entire infrastructure, allowing the company to “identify cause and effect, correlate events, and understand the dense and complex infrastructure,” Conikee stated, likening the system to Google Maps, in that it not only plots from point A to point B, but it identifies potential problems and dangers along the route.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the .NEXT Conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the .NEXT Conference. Neither Nutanix Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE