Cisco advances AI infrastructure services at Cisco Live

Staying on the strategy course

While there was plenty of newness to chew on, one of the more refreshing aspects was something that might seem more mundane. Cisco did not try to introduce a brand-new messaging or marchitecture strategy. The company stuck to its nearly three-year storyline of "Critical infrastructure for AI," built around three essential pillars:

• AI-ready data centers.
• Future-proofed workplaces.
• Digital resilience.

Cisco wraps all of this with embedded security and accelerates it using Cisco AI technologies. This kind of continuity helps tremendously, allowing Cisco's customers and partners to focus on how each pillar evolves incrementally as they advance on their AI journeys. They no longer have to fall back, regroup and re-interpret a new strategy and storyline each year.

Cisco Cloud Control brings it all together

The controlled availability of Cisco Cloud Control embodies the long-promised AgenticOps platform that spans management of Meraki, Catalyst and Nexus networking. That alone is worthy of no small fanfare, but Cloud Control is about much more than converged network management. Here are a few other key elements:

The controlled availability of Cisco Cloud Control embodies the long-promised AgenticOps platform that spans management of Meraki, Catalyst and Nexus networking.

• Integrated cross-domain support for compute (Intersight), observability (Splunk), experience (ThousandEyes), collaboration, security and more. All of these are accessible directly from the Cloud Control homepage and through integrated workflows.
• Deep integration with Cisco IQ. Coming in July, the newly announced service is a support successor platform to CX Cloud. It adds support ticket and case access directly into the primary operations platform.
• An underlying platform using AI technologies, including Cisco's Deep Network Model, agent framework and Cisco AI Canvas, which features a dynamic, interactive collaboration dashboard capability that was previewed last year.
• Cloud Control Marketplace, an open repository of add-ons and extensions from third-party providers, which at launch included 52 partner offerings. Integrations here represent a wide range of uses, from storage management and IT ops connectors to third-party management tools for network and security monitoring and automation.
• New digital twin capabilities for assessing and validating changes before pushing them out to actual devices and systems.
• Cloud Control Studio, which includes both an Agent Builder and an App Builder, for custom adaptations to individual organizations' environments and business needs.

This will move the needle for organizations that are heavy users of Cisco technology, and the tie-ins of Splunk, ThousandEyes and the Marketplace provide mechanisms for addressing the complexities of multi-vendor infrastructure operations.

Preparing the network for Mythos

The arrival of Claude Mythos and Project Glasswing has shaken network security to its core and brought the whole patch process under intense scrutiny. The number of flaws that have been found and that will need to be corrected is staggering, and two key takeaways emerged:

1. Discovery: Networking teams need to find a means to rapidly accelerate their understanding of exactly what they have deployed and, subsequently, what the relevance, impact and priority will be for each patch.
2. Scale: There is no way that organizations can use traditional monthly patch window processes and hope to keep their systems safe and secure. A whole new paradigm is needed to deliver zero-hour fixes across tens, hundreds and even thousands of devices. If there was ever a compelling case for network automation, this is it.

Cisco has scanned over 1.8 billion lines of code across its product lines during the last few months and is preparing to help. First, Cisco has added workflows and dashboards in Cisco IQ to fully discover and document all deployed Cisco gear and directly enable impact assessment. Second, Cisco introduced "Live Protect" capabilities, using eBPF to apply temporary protective shields for vulnerabilities that do not require reboots, upgrades or maintenance windows. This is available immediately for Nexus switches and will be extended to other products over the coming months.

Embracing tokenomics and agent budgets

Agentic AI shows great promise, but cost is becoming an increasing concern. After all, when you launch agents to go and solve problems for you, and some are running 24/7 year-round, how do you make sure they don't exhaust your company's entire token budget? The answer is that you need to either find ways to do inferencing locally, without invoking external AI services, or put limits on how many tokens agents can spend.

Either way, observability and security around agents become paramount concerns, and Cisco is addressing this with acquisitions of Astrix for agent identity -- still pending closure -- and Galileo for agent observability as part of Splunk. The combination puts Cisco in a position to deliver comprehensive agent management and controls. It will be interesting to see how enterprises use these capabilities in the coming months as everyone seeks the best options to address these issues.

Other topics of note

Beyond these core themes, there were many more topics and products in the mix. A few that caught my attention:

• New hardware: For the second year in a row, after an all-Splunk event in 2024, Cisco announced new hardware products. In this case, included were the new C9550 Series Smart Switches, supporting 400G and 6.4 Tbps capacity; the new 8600 Series Secure Routers; the new high-end outdoor Wi-Fi 7 access points; and the new IR1000 ruggedized industrial compact router.
• Silicon: Cisco has continued to double down on the Silicon One architecture and is making solid headway on extending the family across all its networking products, led by the flagship G300, a 3nm chip for ultra-high-performance switching that also embeds security. The resilience of this platform has led to significant design wins in the hyperscaler sector, and those successes have trickled down to benefit enterprises.
• Cisco IQ: While I mentioned this above in the context of Cloud Control and Mythos, it's also worth pointing out how this new support platform will help accelerate the support experience, with automated context gathering, so TAC calls start with the Cisco team fully understanding the current environment and situation rather than having to upload logs and brief TAC engineers. Cisco estimates this could eliminate 35 minutes to 40 minutes of work that typically occurs before the focus turns to the actual problem at hand.
• Integrated security for IIoT: Got a great demo of Cisco's platform for extending security controls in IT/OT environments. Cyber Vision uses deep packet inspection sensor agents to recognize active components, enabling them to be tracked and brought under management control within the Cyber Vision Center. This helps teams more effectively recognize and monitor the entire industrial attack surface.
• Quantum Switch: Perhaps the most forward-looking technology at this event was the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch. While first announced in April, the Cisco Outshift team showed off the prototype switch and discussed how it works in more detail. This world of entangled photons and teleportation for qubits is fascinating and rapidly approaching commercial viability. Very much worth keeping an eye on!

Final takeaway

There was a lot to digest, but a lot to be excited about at this event. Cisco is making good on its strategic arc of delivering practical, effective infrastructure to enable the macro shift toward AI, and is infusing its services with AI technologies and embedded security. While Cisco is rarely the first to move in new directions such as this, it is now aligned fully with this vision, and the company is finding success along the way, to the ultimate benefit of the company, its partners and its customers.

Jim Frey covers networking as principal analyst at Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget.

Omdia is a division of Informa TechTarget. Its analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.