Cisco Adds New Security and AI Capabilities in a Crucial Step Toward Cisco Networking Cloud Vision

IT teams can manage more of their campus and branch secure networking technologies from a unified AI-driven cloud platform with additions to the wireless and switching portfolios

Cisco, the leader in networking and security, introduced new capabilities and technologies across its networking portfolio that are designed to drive a more unified and integrated approach to managing and securing customer networks.

IT organizations are looking to their technology providers to help address three core priorities in their network operations: security, automation, and a unified digital experience for their end users, things and applications. As these same companies look to deploy AI-powered technologies, the need has only grown to have a deep understanding of the end-to-end experience.

Recommended AI News: Cisco’s Pioneering Identity Intelligence Defends Against Most Persistent Cyber Threat

“The future of AI depends on the network and the future of the network depends on AI,” said Jonathan Davidson, EVP and GM, Cisco Networking. “With Cisco Networking Cloud, the data set that feeds this AI comes from more than one billion endpoints. No other networking vendor has more or better intelligence to simplify and secure network operations at any scale for a better user experience.”

Secure Networking 

Users require a secure networking solution that delivers a shared view across their entire network, and a scalable way to enforce security policies everywhere, without compromising their always-on, optimized user experience. To address the needs of their users, Cisco is introducing new Cisco Networking Cloud innovations:

• New Integrations with Cisco Secure Access: Highlighting Cisco’s commitment to provide customers with the tools to bring networking and security teams closer together, Cisco is introducing deeper integrations between Cisco Networking and Security Cloud platforms. These innovations with Cisco Secure Access, Cisco’s Secure Services Edge (SSE) solution, deliver a unified approach to networking and security management, and automated monitoring of the digital experience, providing insights from network, device and application performance metrics. These integrations are available today with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN and ThousandEyes.
• Enhanced security posture reporting for OT assets: Industrial organizations can now utilize the Security Posture report for comprehensive details on OT asset inventories, top vulnerabilities and highest cyber risks to help reduce the attack surface.  These features are available with Cisco Cyber Vision and available as part of our hardened industrial-grade routers, switches, and firewalls.

Simplified Operations

To demonstrate how Cisco is continuing to converge its management platforms and work towards a unified portfolio experience, Cisco is introducing:

• Cloud Monitoring for Catalyst Wireless: First introduced as a capability for Catalyst switching, customers can now view and manage select Catalyst wireless devices in the Meraki dashboard. This new capability gives Cisco customers a complete, cloud-managed view of their access networks. Cloud Monitoring for Catalyst Wireless supports the Catalyst 9800 Wireless Controllers and most Catalyst Wi-Fi 5 Wave 2, Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E access points.
• Catalyst 9300-M Cloud-Managed Switch Models: Cisco is continuing its journey to a single, unified hardware architecture with the new Catalyst 9300-M switches which will be managed natively from the Meraki dashboard. This is the first step in the evolution towards full cloud management for the Catalyst switching portfolio.

Recommended AI News: Cisco Unveils New Innovations on the Cisco Observability Platform

Advance AI with Scalable Infrastructure

Cisco is also unveiling new technologies to help customers accelerate the adoption of AI by providing the right infrastructure for the right use cases.

• Cisco UCS X-Series Direct: An extension of Cisco’s industry-leading and award winning UCS X-Series Modular System, the new Cisco X-Series Direct is built for environments where customers need connectivity and compute power at the edge to support more applications with less infrastructure.
• Cisco AI Validated Designs: Cisco is expanding its offering of converged and hyperconverged validated designs addressing new use cases, leveraging recently announced Cisco Validated Solutions and AI/ML blueprint for data center networks. These designs can accelerate AI/ML deployments and minimize risks by helping customers build high performance compute and data center network fabrics with automation and visibility tailored for a variety of AI-driven enterprise use cases.

Recommended AI News: Cisco and NVIDIA to Help Enterprises Quickly Deploy and Manage Secure AI Infrastructure

[To share your insights with us as part of editorial or sponsored content, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]