Cisco Hypershield Brings Power of Hyperscaler Security and
Connectivity to the Enterprise
News Summary:
- Cisco is powering and protecting the engine of the AI
revolution – AI-scale data centers and clouds – to make every
application and device secure no matter how they are distributed or
connected.
- In today's highly distributed world, the time from
vulnerability to exploitation is shrinking - and defending against
the increasingly sophisticated, complex threat landscape in data
centers is beyond human scale.
- Cisco Hypershield allows customers to put security wherever
they need to - in the cloud, in the data center, on a factory
floor, or a hospital imaging room.
- With AI-native security, customers can autonomously segment
their networks, benefit from distributed and almost instantaneous
exploit protection without a patch, and experience self-qualifying
software upgrades with zero downtime.
SAN JOSE, Calif., April 18, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Cisco
(NASDAQ: CSCO), the leader in security and networking, today
unveiled a radically new approach to securing data centers and
clouds in response to the increasing demands the AI revolution has
put on IT infrastructure. Cisco is rearchitecting how we harness
and protect AI and other modern workloads with industry-first,
Cisco Hypershield. With this unprecedented innovation, Cisco
is tipping the scales in favor of defenders, building on its recent
announcements to accelerate AI infrastructure with Cisco's ethernet
switching, silicon and compute portfolio.
Cisco Hypershield protects applications, devices and data across
public and private data centers, clouds and physical locations -
anywhere customers need it. Designed and built with AI in mind from
the start, Hypershield enables organizations to achieve security
outcomes beyond what has been possible with humans alone.
"Cisco Hypershield is one of the most significant security
innovations in our history," said Chuck
Robbins, Cisco Chair and CEO. "With our data advantage
and strength in security, infrastructure and observability
platforms, Cisco is uniquely positioned to help our customers
harness the power of AI."
Hypershield is a revolutionary new security architecture. It's
built with technology originally developed for hyperscale public
clouds and is now available for enterprise IT teams of all sizes.
More a fabric than a fence, Hypershield enables security
enforcement to be placed everywhere it needs to be. Every
application service in the datacenter. Every Kubernetes cluster in
the public cloud. Every container and virtual machine (VM). It can
even turn every network port into a high-performance security
enforcement point, bringing completely new security capabilities
not just to clouds, but to the data center, on a factory floor, or
a hospital imaging room. This new technology blocks application
exploits in minutes and stops lateral movement in its tracks.
"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," said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and
General Manager for Security and Collaboration at Cisco. "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. 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."
Security enforcement with Hypershield happens at three different
layers: in software, in virtual machines, and in network and
compute servers and appliances, leveraging the same powerful
hardware accelerators that are used extensively in high-performance
computing and hyperscale public clouds.
Hypershield was built on three key pillars:
- AI-Native: Built and designed from the start to be
autonomous and predictive, Hypershield manages itself once it earns
trust, making a hyper-distributed approach at scale possible.
- Cloud-Native: Hypershield is built on open source eBPF,
the default mechanism for connecting and protecting cloud-native
workloads in the hyperscale cloud. Cisco acquired the leading
provider of eBPF for enterprises, Isovalent, earlier this
month.
- Hyper-Distributed: Cisco is completely reimagining how
traditional network security works by embedding advanced security
controls into servers and the network fabric itself. Hypershield
spans all clouds and leverages hardware acceleration like Data
Processing Units (DPU) to analyze and respond to anomalies in
application and network behavior. It shifts security closer to the
workloads that need protection.
Cisco, with its industry-leading expertise in networking,
security and extensive partner ecosystem, together with NVIDIA, is
committed to building and optimizing AI-native security solutions
to protect and scale the data centers of tomorrow. This
collaboration includes leveraging the NVIDIA Morpheus cybersecurity
AI framework for accelerated network anomaly detection, as well as
NVIDIA NIM microservices for powering custom security AI assistants
for the enterprise. NVIDIA's class of converged accelerators
combine the power of GPU and DPU computing, to augment Cisco
Hypershield with robust security from cloud to edge.
"Enterprises across all industries are seeking the security that
can protect them against ever expanding cyber threats," said
Kevin Deierling, Senior Vice
President of Networking at NVIDIA. "Together, Cisco and NVIDIA are
leveraging the power of AI to deliver powerful, incredibly secure
data center infrastructure that will enable enterprises to
transform their businesses and benefit customers everywhere."
As a revolutionary new security architecture, Hypershield is
solving three key customer challenges in defending against today's
sophisticated threat landscape:
- Distributed Exploit Protection: Attackers are adept at
weaponizing newly published vulnerabilities faster than defenders
can patch. With defenders seeing nearly 100 new vulnerabilities
every day, according to Cisco Talos Threat Intelligence, this can
lead to catastrophic results. Hypershield delivers protection in
minutes by automatically testing and deploying compensating
controls into the distributed fabric of enforcement points.
- Autonomous Segmentation: Once an attacker is in the
network, segmentation is key to stopping their lateral movement.
Hypershield perpetually observes, auto-reasons and re-evaluates
existing policies to autonomously segment the network, solving this
in large and complex environments.
- Self-qualifying Upgrades: Hypershield automates the
incredibly laborious and time-consuming process of testing and
deploying upgrades once they are ready, leveraging a dual data
plane. This completely new software architecture allows software
upgrades and policy changes to be placed in a digital twin that
tests updates using the customer's unique combination of traffic,
policies and features, then applying those updates with zero
downtime.
Built into the Security Cloud, Cisco's unified, AI-driven,
cross-domain security platform, Cisco Hypershield is expected to be
Generally Available in August 2024.
With Cisco's recent acquisition of Splunk, customers will gain
unparalleled visibility and insights across their entire digital
footprint for unprecedented security protection.
"AI is not just a force for good but also a tool used for
nefarious purposes, allowing hackers to reverse engineer patches
and create exploits in record time. Cisco looks to address an AI
enabled problem with an AI solution as Cisco Hypershield aims to
tip the scales back in favor of the defender by shielding new
vulnerabilities against exploit in minutes - rather than the days,
weeks or even months as we wait for patches to actually get
deployed," said Frank Dickson,
Group Vice President, Security & Trust at IDC. "With the
number of vulnerabilities ever increasing and the time for
attackers to exploit them at scale ever decreasing, it's clear that
patching alone can't keep up. Tools like Hypershield are necessary
to combat an increasingly clever malicious cyber adversary."
"Cisco Hypershield takes aim at the complex security challenges
of modern, AI-scale data centers. Cisco's vision of a self-managing
fabric that seamlessly integrates from the network to the endpoint
will help redefine what's possible for security at scale," said
Zeus Kerravala, Founder and
Principal Analyst of ZK Research. "For instance, this level of
visibility and control across a hyper-distributed environment
prevents lateral movement of attackers, enabled through a unique
approach to segmentation that's autonomous and highly effective.
While this may seem fantastical, the time is right given recent AI
advances combined with the maturity of cloud-native technologies
like eBPF."
"At AHEAD we believe cybersecurity should be integrated into
everything we do. Bolted-on security is more expensive and less
effective," said Steven Aiello,
Field Chief Information Security Officer at AHEAD. "Cisco
Hypershield ensures that cyber protections are included into the
fabric of the enterprise. Distributed Exploit Protection will be a
massive win for blue teams - legacy synthetic patching was
primarily limited to edge devices, allowing lateral movement once
an attacker breached the perimeter. It's a great day for
cyber-defenders!"
Cisco protects 100 percent of the Fortune 100. To learn more,
visit cisco.com/go/hypershield.
Additional Resources
- Blog: Cisco Hypershield: Security Reimagined -
hyper-distributed security for the AI-scale data center
- Video: Cisco Hypershield: Reimagining security at AI-scale
- B-roll: Soundbites from Cisco
- News Release: Cisco and NVIDIA to Help Enterprises Quickly and
Easily Deploy and Manage Secure AI Infrastructure
About Cisco
Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide
technology leader that securely connects everything to make
anything possible. Our purpose is to power an inclusive future for
all by helping our customers reimagine their applications, power
hybrid work, secure their enterprise, transform their
infrastructure, and meet their sustainability goals. Discover more
on The Newsroom and follow us on X at @Cisco.
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