ARMOR In Action with Cisco: Ensuring Comprehensive Security Coverage for Your Production-Ready AI Factory

As AI shifts from a pilot to a business-critical system, security becomes a defining factor in an AI deployment's success. That is exactly why WWT built ARMOR, our AI Readiness Model for Operational Resilience. ARMOR is a vendor-agnostic AI security framework delivered by WWT, leveraging a jointly built approach with NVIDIA and strengthened through real-world collaboration with the Texas A&M University System. ARMOR gives security leaders a clear and practical way to organize AI risk through expert guidance across six security domains: governance, risk and compliance, model protection, secure AI operations, infrastructure security, data protection, and  secure development lifecycle with the through line topic of cyber resilience. 

ARMOR's six domains focus on key elements of securing AI systems and related processes, helping organizations understand security control points inside and between these systems, and in their interactions with the surrounding environment. This is key to understanding how AI security mechanisms mesh with traditional security solutions and is vital to identifying present gaps. ARMOR also accommodates organizations at different levels of maturity. ARMOR is a proven, real-world validated AI security framework that was shaped through two-way collaboration with a lighthouse customer who served as the first testing ground.

Cisco uniquely delivers end-to-end AI security aligned across all six ARMOR domains through its Secure AI Factory, an enterprise architecture designed by Cisco and NVIDIA and operationalized by WWT for real-world environments. Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA is built on a simple idea. You do not get resilient AI by stacking controls, you get it by designing security as part of how AI is built and run. In the sections ahead, we'll show exactly how Cisco's portfolio maps to each ARMOR domain.

Mapping Cisco's Portfolio to ARMOR Domains

Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA delivers unified security across all six ARMOR domains, giving organizations a scalable, actionable framework for governing and protecting AI systems as they become essential to business operations. The approach emphasizes strong infrastructure protection, operational resilience, and secure model deployment. The mapping below illustrates the high-level coverage of Cisco's broad range of solutions:

Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA demonstrates a focused and specialized approach in alignment with ARMOR. 

With the entire portfolio mapped, now let's look at how each solution within Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA powerfully drives security across the ARMOR domains.

1. Cisco AI Defense

ARMOR Domains: GRC, Secure AI Operations, Model Protection, Secure Development Lifecycle, Data Protection

Cisco AI Defense is the primary control plane for governing, protecting and operating AI models across the enterprise Secure AI Factory. Cisco AI Defense provides both a model‑agnostic gateway between users and LLMs and API‑level controls for embedding runtime guardrails directly into AI workflows. Some key capabilities and alignment areas are:

• Shadow AI Discovery: Identifies unauthorized or unmanaged AI applications and model usage across the cloud, bringing previously unknown AI assets under centralized governance and audit control
• Runtime Guardrails: Inspects AI prompts and responses in real time to prevent prompt injection, jailbreaking, and model extraction, preserving model integrity during production use.
• Automated PII Masking and Data Redaction: Enforces privacy by design by stripping sensitive data from prompts before they leave the enterprise environment, reducing the risk of data leakage to external LLMs.
• Model Validation and Red Teaming: Enables preproduction and continuous validation of model behavior, helping organizations test for safety, misuse and policy violations before and during deployment.
• AI Interaction Logging and Telemetry: Generates detailed records of AI usage and policy enforcement that feed centralized operations and compliance reporting workflows.

2. Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)

ARMOR Domains: GRC, Infrastructure Security, Data Protection

When identity becomes the common control plane, accountability and auditability get easier, and the rest of the security stack can build on a solid foundation. Cisco ISE establishes identity as the foundation of trust across the Secure AI Factory. Features include:

• Identity-based Access Control: Authenticates and distinctly identifies users, devices, and service accounts before granting access to AI infrastructure, datasets, and management consoles.
• Zero Trust Policy Enforcement: Enforces least privilege access based on identity and posture rather than MAC address or network location, preventing unauthorized access to sensitive AI resources.
• Identity Auditing and Logging: Produces detailed identity and access logs that support governance, compliance reporting and accountability requirements.
• Data Access Governance: Ensures that only authorized users and systems can interact with sensitive training data and AI outputs.

3. Isovalent (Cilium)

ARMOR Domains: Secure AI Operations, Infrastructure Security

Isovalent delivers container networking, observability, and security optimized for AI workloads. Primary areas of alignment and capabilities include: 

• eBPF-Based High Performance Networking: Provides low latency, kernel-level networking and security enforcement designed for high bandwidth AI environments.
• Granular Workload Segmentation: Enables identity-aware segmentation at the service level within Kubernetes clusters, limiting lateral movement between AI microservices.
• Deep Observability: Offers fine-grained visibility into service-to-service communication, supporting real-time monitoring and troubleshooting of AI workloads.
• Telemetry Integration for Operations: Feeds detailed network and workload telemetry into centralized security operations platforms for correlation and response.

4. Splunk 

ARMOR Domains: GRC, Secure AI Operations

ARMOR's Secure AI Operations and Cyber Resilience domains depend on centralized visibility and response. Splunk acts as the operational "brain" of the Secure AI Factory. Notable features include:

• Centralized Telemetry Aggregation: Ingests logs and signals from all layers of the Secure AI Factory, including identity, infrastructure, network, and AI protection layers.
• AI Specific Threat Correlation: Detects adversarial AI attacks such as prompt injection, model poisoning, and misuse through holistic information and event analysis.
• Compliance and Audit Dashboards: Provides a single pane of glass for governance reporting and regulatory audits.
• Incident Detection and Response Enablement: Supports rapid investigation and remediation of AIrelated security events.

5. Cisco Hypershield

ARMOR Domains: Infrastructure Security

ARMOR highlights the need for autonomous, resilient infrastructure protection. Cisco Hypershield delivers this through Alternative, kernel level security. Hypershield reduces exposure time and operational burden while maintaining performance. Core capabilities include:

• Enabling Semi-Autonomous Defense to the Secure AI Factory: providing policies that limit exploitation and lateral movement between AI workloads. 
• Virtual Patching: Realtime protection that defends against zero-day vulnerabilities without impact to service uptime.

6. Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall

ARMOR Domains: Infrastructure Security

Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall delivers consistent security across hybrid and multi-cloud AI environments. Once AI workloads span data centers and cloud, consistency becomes the hard part, and Cisco Secure Firewall (as part of the Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall architecture) acts as the multi-tenant enforcement layer across on-prem and cloud environments, especially when paired with identity and network telemetry from ISE.  Key capabilities and alignment areas are:

• Unified Policy Enforcement Across Environments: Applies the same segmentation and access policies to AI workloads running on premises and in the cloud.
• Identity-Aware Traffic Control: Integrates with Cisco ISE to ensure traffic decisions are based on verified identity.
• Hybrid AI Workload Protection: Secures AI services as they move from development to production across different deployment models.

7. Cisco Secure Application

ARMOR Domains: Secure Development Lifecycle

Cisco Secure Application protects the AI software supply chain. A few features include:

• CI/CD Pipeline Scanning: Identifies vulnerabilities, hardcoded secrets and misconfigurations in AI and system build pipelines.
• Secure Build Integrity Verification: Ensures AI application and container integrity, limiting tampering and data manipulation before deployment.
• Dependency and Library Validation: Confirms that AI frameworks and components are free from known exploits.

8. Cisco Secure Access (SSE) and DLP

ARMOR Domains: GRC, Data Protection

Cisco Secure Access and DLP protect data across AI usage scenarios. Some core capabilities include:

• Secure Remote Access to AI Resources: Enables controlled access for distributed users interacting with AI systems.
• Data Loss Prevention Controls: Prevents sensitive data from being shared with unauthorized third-party AI services or models.
• Policy Enforcement and Reporting: Supports governance requirements through consistent enforcement and auditability.

9. Cisco Talos Threat Intelligence

ARMOR Domains: Secure AI Operations

Security teams move faster when they have context, and Cisco Talos Threat Intelligence works to bring that context to secure AI operations. Feature highlights cover:

• Threat Intelligence Feeds: Supplies continuously updated intelligence on emerging threats, including AI focused attack techniques.
• Detection Enrichment: Integrates into agnostic SOC environments.
• Operational Resilience Support: Helps security teams adapt detection and response strategies as AI threats evolve.

10. Cisco Nexus Switches

ARMOR Domains: Infrastructure Security

In high performance AI, security cannot introduce a bottleneck, and Cisco's DPU-enabled switching is designed to provide performance at scale. Cisco's Nexus Smart Switches with DPUs offload security tasks such as encryption, telemetry, and enforcement to the hardware layer, including integration with NVIDIA® BlueField® DPUs. Reliable high-throughput networking is part of what makes 'secure and scalable' AI possible, not an afterthought.

Ready to get started?

At WWT we're setting a New Standard for Enterprise-ready AI with Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA. Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA delivers a comprehensive, ARMOR-aligned approach to AI security. Looking ahead, Cisco is actively advancing its roadmap to address emerging challenges posed by quantum technologies and agentic AI, with a focus on securing AI systems, preventing misuse, and implementing quantum-resistant protections. 

For organizations getting started with ARMOR, the journey begins with visibility and prioritization.