Cisco Live is the company’s flagship annual event based in San Diego.
The five-day convention will see customers, professionals, and business leaders from around the globe coming together for a series of keynotes, demos, and networking opportunities.
With the best part of three days still to go, the vendor has already made a number of significant AI announcements.
Interestingly, thus far, Cisco appears to be concentrating many of its new solutions and enhancements around simplifying the implementation process in the “era of AI.”
Indeed, Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer of Cisco, stated:
“The world is moving from chatbots intelligently answering our questions to agents conducting tasks and jobs fully autonomously. This is the agentic era of AI.
“As billions of AI agents begin working on our behalf, the demand for high-bandwidth, low latency and power efficient networking for data centers will soar.
Cisco is at the forefront, delivering advanced, secure networking technology that’s foundational to the AI-ready data centers of the future.
So, let’s take a look at how Cisco plans to make life easier for bsuinesses looking to fully embrace the power of AI.
Supercharged Security for the Agentic AI Era
A crucial aspect of AI adoption is having robust, fit-for-purpose security infrastructure in place.
Although AI represents opportunities for improvement in the customer service and experience space, it can also be weaponized by hackers and bad actors.
To combat this, Cisco is embedding security features deeper within its networking infrastructure.
In particular, the vendor has revealed a number of fresh capabilities for its Hybrid Mesh Firewall and Universal (Zero Trust Network Access) ZTNA.
These aren’t just standalone tools; they’re designed to seamlessly integrate into the user network, forming a powerful zero-trust security framework.
The Hybrid Mesh Firewall delivers a distributed security fabric for zero-trust segmentation, AI application protection, and advanced threat defense across all environments – from data centers to the myriad of IoT devices.
It is built to operate as a cohesive shield, encompassing Cisco’s own and third-party firewalls, alongside Cisco Hypershield and Secure Workload.
Complementing this, Universal ZTNA provides secure, identity-driven access for users and devices, no matter their location – unifying policy management and extending zero-trust even to more difficult and unmanaged devices.
The synergy of these solutions is where the real power lies.
Together, they fortify user-to-application connections and critical back-end interactions.
Management is streamlined through Cisco’s Security Cloud Control, while AI-driven insights boost observability.
This results in organizations gaining the capacity to scale securely and safeguard their digital assets amidst today’s ever-evolving threat landscape.
Network Architecture Tailormade for AI Adoption
Cisco is aiming to tackle operational complexity with a unified management platform.
The solution brings together Meraki and Catalyst device management, supports next-gen wireless, switching, routing, and industrial networks, and works across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments.
Enhanced by ThousandEyes assurance, the platform offers expanded visibility into mobile endpoints, industrial IoT, and Microsoft Azure.
A new integration with Splunk also provides real-time, end-to-end insights from network to application – ensuring consistent performance across all infrastructure layers.
At the core is AgenticOps, Cisco’s AI-powered operations framework. It uses real-time telemetry, automation, and a Deep Network Model – a Cisco-trained, domain-specific LLM – to power intelligent, autonomous actions while keeping IT teams in control.
This model also drives the Cisco AI Assistant, which uses natural language to detect issues, identify root causes, and automate workflows.
In discussing the new features, Matt Eastwood, Senior Vice President at IDC, claimed that organizations are “at a critical juncture.
“The promise of AI is immense, but the reality is that existing enterprise networks are simply not equipped to handle the scale, security, and reliability requirements that AI demands.
Cisco’s new secure network architecture marks a critical evolution in networking and provides a future-ready foundation for enterprises to confidently embrace AI without sacrificing performance or security.
AI-Ready, Enterprise-Specific Data Centers
As discussed so far, Cisco is making a concerted effort to allow for a more straightforward AI adoption process for its customers.
With this in mind, the new features and improvements being made to the vendor’s data centers are designed to simplify, secure, and future-proof them during the AI era.
In doing so, Cisco hopes to enable enterprises and service leaders to scale their AI ambitions with confidence.
Below is a selection of some of the more notable enhancements to Cisco’s AI-ready data centers:
Unified Fabric Experience with Nexus
With a promise to simplify network operations and boost efficiency, the innovation combines Cisco ACI and Nexus’ NX-OS VXLAN EVPN fabrics with unifying data, control, policy enforcement, and management.
This allows the Unified Nexus Dashboard to consolidate services across LAN, SAN, IPFM, and AI/ML fabrics into a single platform.
Maximize AI Networking Performance
Cisco is enhancing AI Networking Performance to optimize workload operations.
Available now, Cisco Intelligent Packet Flow steers traffic using real-time telemetry and congestion awareness across AI fabrics, providing end-to-end visibility for proactive issue detection.
Enhancing AI Adoption with Nvidia
Cisco AI Defense and Cisco Hypershield now offer comprehensive visibility, validation, and runtime protection for the entire enterprise AI workflow, and are included in the NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory validated design
With AI Defense, enterprises can effectively secure AI agents built with leading open models and optimized with NVIDIA NIM and NeMo microservices.
