Cisco shows off new AI features to secure data flows

Cisco has offered more detail on its plans to integrate artificial intelligence into what is still one of the largest product portfolios in the tech industry.

There was no single blockbuster announcement at the Cisco Live event in Las Vegas this week. Instead, attendees have been given a peek into forthcoming features and capabilities across a wide range of products and services that, together, signal a gradual transformation of Cisco’s offering as it seeks support — and use — AI throughout the enterprise.

Cisco Hypershield, a cloud hyperscaler security system announced in April as an extension to the Cisco Security Cloud, now supports AMD’s Pensando Data Processing Units (DPUs), a hardware platform designed to accelerate AI workloads.

These will be integrated into Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) servers by the end of 2024, the company said.

Further up the stack, the Security Cloud now has a new management layer enabled by AI, Security Cloud Control. Described by Cisco as “AI Native” and available from September, this automates security response across hybrid cloud environments without the need for human intervention.

And Cisco Live wouldn’t feel like a Cisco event without at least one firewall announcement and sure enough, the company is promoting its new Firewall 1200 Series to address the problem of networking hardware sprawl making SD-WAN harder to implement than it should be.

Available in October, the target here is branch networks looking to consolidate multiple routers and switches into a more compact footprint, the company said.

Cisco ThousandEyes

The company has also added new AI capabilities to its ThousandEyes network performance and intelligence platform. Through this, customers can get a single unified view of telemetry across all of their cloud environments, something that would be impossible without AI’s ability to process large volumes of data.

“A majority of outages are caused by operator error,” explained Cisco Networking executive VP and General Manager, Jonathan Davidson.

“Digital Experience Assurance powered by ThousandEyes enables proactive, automated event remediation and can even correlate configuration histories across owned infrastructure and your public cloud infrastructure. This can mean the difference between a four-hour outage and a four-minute disruption.”

Security abstraction layer

According to Cisco’s CTO for UK and Ireland, Chintan Patel, AI has turned into a major headache for customers, who want to reap its benefits as soon as possible but know they lack the infrastructure to achieve this.

It wasn’t enough to add AI features to software at the top of the stack if the underlying hardware and integration between the different layers of technology couldn’t support it, he said.

This is why Cisco is now focused on innovating across every layer of the hardware and software stack.

A good example of the effect of complexity is the way that digital supply chains have become fragmented as organizations grow more dependent on third-party platforms, said Patel.

“All of the digitization that’s happened post-pandemic has introduced more layers to the digital experience than we’ve ever seen before. There is infrastructure that organizations own and there is infrastructure that organizations don’t own but rely on.”

This complexity is introducing thousands of points of failure and security blind spots, not helped by major cloud providers each offering different management interfaces and technologies. Cisco’s Security Cloud could act as an abstraction layer that would shield organizations.

“We can help our customers start to simplify these environments and abstract some of the complexity away from these environments,” said Patel.