Every year I look forward to Cisco Live because it’s a chance to showcase all the incredible innovations our teams have been delivering and hear unfiltered feedback directly from our customers.

In security, we delivered more innovation in 2023 than in the previous decade. And in 2024 we will deliver multiples of last year. We’ve accelerated innovation to ensure we provide the scale of protection and digital resilience that our customers demand.

No matter how reliable and performant your network is, it doesn’t matter if it’s not secure. To help make the world a safer place, we need to reimagine security.

Why? Because security is critical infrastructure protecting critical infrastructure that keeps people safe.  And because security is still far too complex, with most organizations managing dozens of point solutions that don’t work well together. Also, because AI is changing everything, securing modern AI-scale data centers and clouds requires new approaches. Bad actors are using AI tools to mount increasingly sophisticated attacks and avoid detection. It’s because of this that AI is critical to helping protect our customers at machine scale, not just human scale. It’s what helps tip the scales in favor of the defenders.

And at Cisco Live this week our teams shared what we’re doing to help reimagine security.

Security Cloud innovations

Cisco Security Cloud is our integrated AI-powered security platform that minimizes the need for multiple point solutions for user protection, cloud protection, and breach protection. We’ve been innovating across our entire Security Cloud platform.  These aren’t just new features or enhancements. In many cases, they’re brand new product categories and architectures we’re bringing to the market, giving customers better security efficacy, better IT and user experiences, and better economics.

In April, we announced the most consequential new security product that Cisco has launched in 40 years – Cisco Hypershield. It infuses security into the fabric of the network –  giving you thousands of security enforcement points, across Kubernetes containers, virtual machines, and servers and network devices with hardware acceleration like digital processing units (DPUs). It places security wherever you need it, close to the workloads across your distributed multi-cloud environments. Learn more about how Hypershield delivers hyper-distributed security for the AI-scale data center.

And this week we announced how we’re taking Hypershield further, with support for AMD’s Pensando DPUs. With these DPUs, Hypershield will work on private cloud servers including Cisco UCS. We’ll also be supporting Intel infrastructure processing units (IPUs) with availability to be announced in the future. For  more information, read the press release: Cisco Security Cloud vision comes to life transforming enterprise defenses.

This week we also talked about how we’re bringing the Cisco Security and Networking Clouds closer together. An example of this is our new integration of Cisco XDR with Meraki MX. Now, Meraki MX can send its telemetry directly to Cisco XDR for analysis and correlation with other telemetry, and network teams can see XDR incidents right in the Meraki dashboard. It gives Meraki admins better visibility and a way to take immediate action on potential threats.

Because it’s a platform, Cisco Security Cloud is designed to take advantage of common elements – including a common management plane. And we took a big step in that direction this week by announcing Cisco Security Cloud Control. It will become the single unified management interface for the entire Security Cloud, which will dramatically simplify the security admin and IT experience. We’re targeting initial availability by October with support for our network security products, with more to be added in the months ahead.

Of course, a key aspect of the Cisco Security Cloud is AI. We’re using it pervasively across our platform.  One tangible manifestation of AI for our customers is the Cisco AI Assistant. What’s different about our approach is that it’s not multiple assistants; it’s a single, common assistant that extends beyond security. That’s the benefit of a platform approach. We bring telemetry from across Cisco into our AI Assistant. And each of our products has a set of skills for different use cases, and they just plug seamlessly into our AI Assistant.

Firewall is a key foundation for the Security Cloud. And we announced our newest offering, the Secure Firewall 1200 Series. It has up to 3X the performance of competitors’ firewalls. It’s a simpler solution for IT, with great price and performance.

Cisco + Splunk

We are only a few months into our acquisition of Splunk. This move cements us as one of the largest and most influential security companies in the world.  Our cultural and product alignment is clear.  We are truly going to be better together, accelerating innovation and delivering for our customers.

This week we talked about how we’re bringing Splunk together with the Cisco Security Cloud to change the game for threat detection and incident response. Last month at RSA, we announced Cisco XDR’s integration with Splunk. And this week, we announced that we’re integrating the rest of the Security Cloud with Splunk.

Together, we now have the security industry’s most comprehensive AI-powered tools for organizations of any size and maturity level, with the broadest set of telemetry and visibility. This is key because security is fundamentally a data problem. Our data advantage will power the SOC of the future and transform how they prevent, detect, and respond to increasingly sophisticated attacks.

Ecosystem and partnerships

At Cisco, we know that our customers will have products from other vendors too. We want to make sure that our platforms are open and that we work with a broad ecosystem of technology partners. Because in cybersecurity, we believe vendors need to work together, against our common adversaries.

One industry stalwart we’re aligning with is Microsoft. We want our platforms to work well together, and Microsoft’s Vasu Jakkal joined me on the Cisco Live main stage to talk about how we are working together in areas like AI and platform interoperability.

Another is Google. We announced a collaboration between Cisco Secure Access with Google Chrome Enterprise browser, bringing the best of our browser security and Google’s cloud security together to help simplify security for our customers.

We also announced our strategic investment in Scale AI. Scale has been working with most of the largest companies and governments in the world delivering AI innovation. Scale AI provides a data-centric, end-to-end platform providing training and validation for AI applications.  Initially our partnership will focus on developing AI models for real enterprise outcomes that you won’t get with models trained on the public internet. I can’t say more but there is a lot more to come from our partnership.

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to watch our keynote on demand to learn more about everything we’re doing to reimagine security for our customers. And take a look at the links below for more details on our announcements from Cisco Live. I’m so proud of what our teams have been delivering, and even more excited about what’s ahead. It’s a privilege to play a small part in a global movement to help keep the world safe and secure.

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