Cisco has revealed more details about its strategy to weave artificial intelligence into its vast array of technology products.
While this year’s Cisco Live event in Las Vegas didn’t feature a standout single announcement, attendees received insights into upcoming enhancements and functions across various services and products. This gradual shift underscores Cisco’s commitment to embedding AI across business operations.
One key development is the Cisco Hypershield, a cloud-based hyper-scale security solution that was first announced in April as part of the Cisco Security Cloud. It now accommodates AMD’s Pensando Data Processing Units (DPUs), which are specialized hardware designed to boost AI-driven tasks.
These DPUs are planned to be incorporated into Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) servers by the end of 2024, according to the tech giant.
The Security Cloud has been enhanced with a new AI-powered management layer, the Security Cloud Control, which will be accessible from September. Cisco refers to it as “AI Native,” and it enables automated security responses across various cloud environments, eliminating the need for human interaction.
In keeping with tradition, Cisco Live featured an announcement about the latest addition to their firewall lineup, the Firewall 1200 Series. This new firewall seeks to address the challenge of increasing network hardware sprawl, which complicates the implementation of SD-WAN.
Slated for release in October, the Firewall 1200 Series is particularly aimed at branch networks that are attempting to combine multiple routers and switches into a streamlined framework, according to the company.
Cisco ThousandEyes
The corporation has enhanced its ThousandEyes network performance and intelligence platform by integrating advanced AI technologies. This improvement allows consumers to seamlessly monitor telemetry data across various cloud settings using AI’s robust data processing capabilities.
“Operator error is the cause of most outages,” stated Jonathan Davidson, the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Cisco Networking.
“With Digital Experience Assurance powered by ThousandEyes, we can provide automated, proactive solutions for event remediation and track configuration changes across both owned and public cloud infrastructures. This capability could reduce potential disruptions from hours to just minutes.”
Security abstraction layer
Chintan Patel, who is the CTO for UK and Ireland at Cisco, has noted that AI is becoming a significant challenge for their customers. They are eager to leverage AI’s capabilities, but they are hindered by inadequate infrastructure.
Patel mentioned that simply incorporating AI functionalities into the software isn’t sufficient if the fundamental hardware and the integration between various technology layers are not supportive.
Therefore, Cisco is concentrating on innovation at every level of the hardware and software stack to address these challenges.
Patel also highlighted the complexity in digital supply chains, which have grown increasingly splintered due to a greater reliance on third-party platforms as organizations expand.
“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.
