Cisco, renowned for its leadership in security and networking, has introduced a groundbreaking approach to safeguarding data centers and cloud environments, responding to the heightened demands posed by the AI revolution on IT infrastructure. This innovation, dubbed Cisco Hypershield, marks a significant departure in how organizations secure and manage AI and other modern workloads, providing unprecedented levels of protection.
Chuck Robbins, Chair and CEO of Cisco, lauded Hypershield as one of the most remarkable security innovations in the company’s history, highlighting Cisco’s unique position to leverage its data advantage and expertise in security, infrastructure, and observability platforms to empower customers with AI-driven security solutions.
Hypershield represents a revolutionary security architecture, drawing on technology initially developed for hyperscale public clouds but now accessible to enterprise IT teams of all sizes. Unlike traditional security approaches, Hypershield functions more like a fabric than a fence, enabling security enforcement to be deployed wherever needed, whether in data centers, clouds, physical locations, or network ports.
Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager for Security and Collaboration at Cisco, emphasized the transformative potential of AI in reimagining data center operations, connectivity, and security. He underscored Hypershield’s ability to deploy security anywhere, whether in software, servers, or network switches, enabling simplified management and enhanced autonomy at a significantly lower cost.
Hypershield’s security enforcement operates across three layers: 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 rests on three fundamental pillars: AI-Native, Cloud-Native, and Hyper-Distributed. By being inherently autonomous and predictive, Hypershield can manage itself once it earns trust, enabling hyper-distributed security enforcement at scale.
Cisco’s collaboration with NVIDIA further strengthens its commitment to delivering AI-native security solutions. Leveraging NVIDIA’s advanced AI frameworks and converged accelerators, Cisco Hypershield aims to provide robust security from cloud to edge, protecting enterprises against evolving cyber threats.
Hypershield addresses three critical challenges in defending against sophisticated cyber threats: Distributed Exploit Protection, Autonomous Segmentation, and Self-qualifying Upgrades. By automating processes such as testing and deploying upgrades, Hypershield significantly enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of security operations.
Expected to be Generally Available in August 2024, Cisco Hypershield, integrated into the Security Cloud, is poised to offer customers unparalleled visibility and insights across their entire digital footprint, empowering them with unprecedented security protection.
