Cisco Live 2024: A Security Architecture for the Artificial Intelligence Era
Cisco announced a series of new security offerings at Cisco Live 2024, designed to establish itself as a leader in defense capabilities powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
“Really, what we’re doing is taking security, melting it, and infusing it into the fabric of the network,” Jeetu Patel, the company’s executive vice president and general manager for security and collaboration, told assembled media and analysts Monday.
Two of the announcements concerned the capabilities of Cisco’s new Hypershield security platform. Unveiled at the RSA Conference 2024 show in April, Hypershield is a security architecture that the company describes as “designed to defend modern, AI-scale data centers.”
At Cisco Live, the company announced that Hypershield would support Pensando data processing units by chipmaker AMD, and infrastructure processing units by Intel. DPUs and IPUs are part of an emerging class of specialty processors designed to accelerate workloads within data centers in the age of AI. DPUs focus on data processing tasks while IPUs accelerate network infrastructure and infrastructure services such as virtual switching.
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Hypershield is expected to be available to the public in August. Support for the specialty processing units will come shortly after, Cisco said. Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s security business group, said it is already “oversubscribed” with customers looking to be early adopters of Hypershield. During his keynote remarks Tuesday, Patel argued that Hypershield represents a completely new category of security product, one that no other company offers, and called it Cisco’s biggest security innovation in 40 years.
“I hope you’re feeling the change in tempo and hyper-innovation that we’ve been experiencing recently,” Patel said. “There was more innovation in 2023 than in the previous 10 years, and 2024 is going to be a multiple of ’23.”
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Easier Management Coming for Cisco Security Cloud
Cisco also announced a new generation of firewall, its 1200 series, which it expects to become available in October. The 1200 series firewalls are “SD-WAN enabled, high-performing, compact firewall security appliances that eliminate the need to have multiple appliances for switches, routers and firewalls at enterprise branch locations,” the company said in a release, adding that it is capable of “delivering up to three times the performance of comparable competitive firewalls.”
The company also introduced Cisco Security Cloud Control, a new way of managing its popular Security Cloud platform. And it said it would integrate data from Splunk, a security observability and data analytics company, which it acquired for $28 billion in March, into Security Cloud.
Patel described security as “a data problem” that can only be solved with data. Cisco’s moves over the past several years — both with its acquisitions of companies such as Splunk and with its investments in its own product development — are part of a strategy to offer its customers access to the most comprehensive data sets and analytics capabilities possible to defend themselves with.
“The more data that can be correlated together to help increase the signal and reduce the noise,” the better, he said. “The noise-signal ratio has to get better.”
Cisco Wants to Be a Vital Cyber Resilience Partner
An effective security program involves breach response as well as prevention, Patel said. The concept of cyber resilience — the ability to quickly detect and recover from cyberattacks — is gaining currency among security experts and solutions providers alike, with organizations recognizing that total prevention is unrealistic.
“The name of the game, the thing we have to do, is prevent lateral movement,” after an attacker has breached a network, he said. Cybercriminals may be interested in stealing credit card numbers, but once they’ve penetrated a network, they’re going to look around to see what of value they may be able to steal or encrypt.
Patel described Cisco as being in a unique position to help companies reduce that lateral movement because of its background in networking, security and AI: “Where does that movement happen? On the network. Who’s most qualified to provide data and telemetry about what’s happening? Cisco.”
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