Cisco Live: Security focus yields new firewalls, Hypershield integrations, and agentic AI defenses
by Michael Cooney, Network World
SAN DIEGO – Cisco unwrapped a variety of advanced firewall and AI software enhancements aimed at further combining and simplifying its network and security technology across enterprise infrastructures.
At its Cisco Live event, the vendor rolled out a new Hybrid Mesh Firewall portfolio, bolstered security support with partner NVIDIA, and further tightened its own technology integration with its Splunk platform. The announcements share a common goal of protecting all things AI – workloads, inferencing, models and more – as Cisco works to secure the core infrastructure that supports the AI build-out.
"Without AI trust and security built-in to the underlying network infrastructure, there won't be AI, and every new AI agent is both an asset and a new security risk. As such, agentic AI will force us to challenge assumptions, such as how we validate identity and how quickly we must respond to threats when something goes wrong," said Jeetu Patel, Cisco's president and chief product officer. "The only scalable way to deal with the complexity of agentic AI is to fuse security into the network, and that's what we are rapidly developing."
Eliminating firewall choke points
The combination of the mesh firewall and Cisco's Hypershield security platform addresses several enterprise security ills, said Neil Anderson, vice president of cloud, infra, and AI solutions with IT service and global systems integrator World Wide Technology.
Hypershield includes AI-based software, virtual machines, and other technology that will ultimately be baked into core networking components, such as switches, routers or servers. It promises to let organizations autonomously segment their networks when threats are a problem and gain rapid exploit protection without having to patch or revamp firewalls.
"For about 25 years, we've had this kind of architecture that I call the choke point firewall design where customers bring all their traffic through a beefy firewall, and then let it go on its way again," Anderson said. "We're so far beyond that now. When you think about the speeds that AI is operating at, you really can't have a choke point mentality anymore. You've got to have distributed enforcement points."
"The idea of having this mesh of firewalls wherever you need enforcement, and then being able to control those very simply, from Cisco Cloud Control, Secure Cloud Control is huge. It solves so many problems for our customers just trying to scale out," Anderson said.