Cisco Data Fabric powered by the Splunk Platform<\/a> as its unified data layer, provides cross-domain telemetry for all of a customer\u2019s domains across all Cisco products, platforms, services and agents via what Sampath said were purposeful models aimed at solving specific types of tasks and issues. These include a deep network model, a cybersecurity model called Foundation-Sec, and frontier models.<\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s really about matching the right intelligence to the right type of task, and that\u2019s what we\u2019re doing here,\u201d he said. \u201cWe use a combination of the telemetry and the purposeful models to be able to build these trusted agents. When you combine the model intelligence with the telemetry, that\u2019s really what makes these agents drive the outcomes that you\u2019re looking for.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cisco has a strong end-to-end play that works only when utilizing all the components, said Lane Irvine, alliance leader at Long View Systems, a Calgary, Alberta-based solution provider and longtime Cisco channel partner.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow we can bring that together to take advantage of the Cisco platform,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a great opportunity for them. I think it\u2019s an important move as we start leading into Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel taking over all the platforms. They are trying to create a more synergistic environment for that joint development, and that\u2019s where I think Cloud Control will be a strong move.\u201d<\/p>\n
With Cisco Cloud Control, Cisco wants everything to be managed from a central control plane, said Faisal Bhutto, president and CEO of Alykas, a Houston-based solution provider and longtime Cisco channel partner.<\/p>\n
The reality is that OEMs like Cisco know their tech stacks better than anybody, Bhutto told CRN.<\/p>\n
\u201cCisco knows Meraki, how it works, how it operates,\u201d he said. \u201cCisco knows the Catalyst line, UCS, the whole fabric and how they operate. So customers, instead of creating their own automation tools to run a multisite WAN or SD-WAN or a big SaaS deployment, they want OEMs like Cisco to come up with agentic AI they can use along with their human resources. The promise is there. I can see that becoming more and more real, where our customers can be in Cloud Control with access to agentic bots that take action, pending approval.\u201d<\/p>\n
Customers won\u2019t be comfortable letting agentic AI take actions, Bhutto said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut there definitely is a huge value where customers can say, \u2018Instead of me having all these NOC [Network Operations Center) resources, I don\u2019t really need them because that\u2019s what agentic AI can handle, but I will keep decision-making in my control,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cShould there be a config change that has to be rolled out or some other modification, go into Cloud Control and approve that change for it to get pushed out. I think customers are going to be more comfortable with that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cisco Cloud Control Tuesday entered controlled availability in the U.S.<\/p>\n
Beyond Cisco Cloud Control<\/p>\n
Within Cisco Cloud Control lies Cisco AI Canvas, an environment for humans and AI agents to work together in real time to investigate, correlate and resolve complex issues, Sampath said. AI Canvas is also going into controlled availability, he said.<\/p>\n
To make it work, Cisco Tuesday also introduced Agent Studio, Sampath said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAgent Studio allows you to seamlessly bring in third-party agents that help you, and we also additionally on top of that help you design your own agents and consume the agents that we at Cisco are building for you,\u201d he said. \u201c[Agent Studio] systematically brings all of these pieces together, but we also recognize that every single IT administrator, security operator, every single operator, is turning into a builder today.\u201d<\/p>\n
Using Codex and Claude Code, businesses can build complex systems quickly, Sampath said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to help teams to customize each and every single operation in a way that\u2019s unique to their workflows, and so we\u2019re launching an app builder, which is a space for creating and customizing applications and workflows inside of Cisco Cloud Control, which essentially makes Cloud Control a harness that is powered by Open AI\u2019s Codex that is natively integrated into Cisco Cloud Control,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Cisco has made a lot of investments into AI and agentic AI, Long View Systems\u2019 Irvine said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs customers look at their environments now, they\u2019ve got higher expectations of what they need to get from that environment, and that\u2019s where Cisco and others really need to use agentic AI agents to go,\u201d he said. \u201cThe question is, \u2018How are we going to manage this from an operational perspective? How are we going to get insight into what\u2019s going on?\u2019 We want to be able to get predictive insight. \u2026 Agentic AI really opens the door for that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cisco\u2019s work around AI Canvas is also interesting, Irvine said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I\u2019m having a network issue, it might be my network is slow,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat does that mean? Where is that impacted? I need to be able to look at everything from security to infrastructure to wireless to end-user information. I need to look at that entire stream to analyze and quickly identify where there\u2019s an issue, even the application level. And with the Cisco portfolio, we\u2019ll have a much better insight into that. AI Canvas provides that platform to do it across the infrastructure.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cisco has also been busy on the quantum computing front, said Anurag Dhingra, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco\u2019s Enterprise Connectivity and Collaboration Group.<\/p>\n
Cisco has been advancing its post-quantum cryptography, and earlier this year introduced post-quantum crypto support for its smart switches and routers, Dhingra said.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow we\u2019re extending that to SD-WAN links to protect all traffic in transit,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Cisco this week also unveiled significant enhancements to its post-quantum encryption capabilities, including signed digital images of the software-hardware trust angle secure boot and making its crypto libraries ready for a post-quantum world, Dhingra said.<\/p>\n
Customers are certainly starting to look at what it takes to be quantum-ready, Irvine said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know that everybody fully appreciates the risk, but it is something that Cisco absolutely needs to lean into,\u201d he said. \u201cWe need to educate our customers about quantum-ready and the requirements for quantum-ready infrastructure because the \u2018harvest now, decrypt later\u2019 move is already happening. We have to be ready for post-quantum cryptography.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition, Cisco unveiled new resilient infrastructure services to help customers and partners integrate the company\u2019s new security technologies, said Bhaskar Jayakrishnan, senior vice president of engineering for customer experience at Cisco.<\/p>\n
Resilient infrastructure services include a three-step approach, he said: assess exposure, modernize infrastructure and build defensive resilience.<\/p>\n
More self-healing, proactive and preventative protection helps employees and customers worry less and focus more on speed and execution instead of protecting themselves from the bad guys, Alykas\u2019 Bhutto said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe reality is the same kind of capabilities over time do get into the hands of bad guys as well, and they constantly find ways to penetrate and exploit,\u201d he said. \u201cWhy do I have a bad feeling that an LLM like a Mythos might exist somewhere else that somebody may be using already to exploit security issues? Remember, in security, the name of the game is not the threat actors or your private threat actor. There are state actors involved, and that\u2019s a different legal thing. Who is to say that an enemy state is not already figuring out how to get ahead of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Also new from Cisco is its Quantum Ready Assessment as part of Cisco IQ, which works with new quantum-ready hardware to identify areas most at risk for \u201charvest now, decrypt later\u201d attacks, Jayakrishnan said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we help our customers with is to evaluate their landscape so that they know what to prepare for which network devices to either replace or upgrade to get to quantum readiness,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The result will be quantum-safe assessments, Jayakrishnan said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe give our customers a top-down and a bottom-up view of whether they can take a look at their overall estate, compare how ready they are according to the regulatory requirements of their own region, and what are the next set of actions, whether they need to upgrade the hardware, upgrade software, take care of features, or how much of their estate is quantum safe,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Quantum readiness is less about future technology and more about how to modernize and manage existing encryption, identity and trust in enterprises, Irvine said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWithout that encryption and security in today\u2019s environment, whatever\u2019s coming is irrelevant, and we\u2019ve got to make sure that we\u2019re prepared for it now even if the immediate impacts are limited,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Quantum resilience has been a topic for years, although AI has kind of overshadowed it in the past couple of years, Bhutto said.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverybody has to figure out and ensure that as quantum computing becomes more readily available and accessible at certain price points, the encryption mechanisms and keys we use today are quantum-resilient,\u201d he said. \u201cOtherwise, they can easily be broken. Customers worry about it, but to be honest, the AI talk track has almost overshadowed everything else. Quantum security used to be a big topic two years ago. But now customers are so focused on agentic AI that they\u2019re not talking about it as much.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cisco rolls out new agentic AI, security and quantum-readiness technologies at Cisco Live, centering on Cisco Cloud Control,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":59313,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[179,7493,405,408,399,313,9959,4956,1777],"class_list":["post-59312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-agentic-ai","tag-agentic-ai","tag-agentic-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai-agents","tag-ai-applications","tag-application-and-platform-security","tag-cybersecurity","tag-enterprise-networking","tag-network-infrastructure","tag-network-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59312\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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