Cisco, a security and networking solutions provider, unveiled its latest strategy for data centers and the cloud in response to the escalating demands imposed by the (artificial intelligence) AI revolution on IT infrastructure.
Called Cisco Hypershield, this approach promises a significant leap in safeguarding applications, devices, and data across both public and private environments.
“AI has the potential to empower the world’s 8 billion people to have the same impact as 80 billion. With this abundance, we must reimagine the role of the data center — how data centers are connected, secured, operated and scaled,” Jeetu Patel, EVP and GM for Security and Collaboration at Cisco, said in a media release.
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Hypershield is designed to accommodate the evolving landscape of modern workloads, particularly AI, by offering security outcomes that surpass the capabilities of human intervention alone. Unlike traditional security measures, Hypershield operates as a fabric rather than a fence, allowing security enforcement to permeate every aspect of the IT infrastructure, from applications and Kubernetes clusters to network ports.
“The power of Cisco Hypershield is that it can put security anywhere you need it – in software, in a server, or in the future even in a network switch,” Patel explained. “When you have a distributed system that could include hundreds of thousands of enforcement points, simplified management is mission critical. And we need to be orders-of-magnitude more autonomous, at an orders-of-magnitude lower cost.”
Hypershield operates at multiple layers, including software, virtual machines, and network and compute servers, leveraging powerful hardware accelerators to analyze and respond to anomalies in application and network behavior effectively.
The architecture of Hypershield is built on three key pillars:
- AI-Native
- Cloud-Native
- Hyper-Distributed
These pillars enable Hypershield to autonomously manage and predict security threats, leverage open-source technologies like eBPF for cloud-native workloads, and embed advanced security controls directly into servers and network fabrics.
NVIDIA partnership
Cisco’s collaboration with NVIDIA aims to optimize AI-native security solutions by integrating NVIDIA’s Morpheus cybersecurity AI framework and NIM microservices, which combine GPU and DPU computing to enhance Hypershield’s capabilities from cloud to edge.
Hypershield addresses three critical challenges faced by enterprises in defending against sophisticated cyber threats: Distributed Exploit Protection, Autonomous Segmentation, and Self-Qualifying Upgrades. By automating the deployment of compensating controls, autonomously segmenting the network, and streamlining the upgrade process, Hypershield provides comprehensive protection against evolving threats.
Expected to be generally available in August 2024, Cisco Hypershield will be integrated into Cisco’s unified, AI-driven, cross-domain security platform, providing customers with unparalleled visibility and insights across their digital footprint.