Today Cisco launched one of the most exciting security solutions that the company has worked on in the past 40 years in the area of cybersecurity. The company unveiled a radically new approach to securing data centres and clouds in response to the increasing demands the AI revolution has put on IT infrastructure. With this unprecedented innovation, Cisco is rearchitecting how we harness and protect AI and other modern workloads with industry-first, Cisco Hypershield.
Fady Younes, Managing Director for Cybersecurity at Cisco in the Middle East and Africa shares insight into this innovation and what it brings to the world of cybersecurity, in the era of AI.
What is the essence of Cisco Hypershield?
Cisco Hypershield protects applications, devices and data across public and private data centres, clouds and physical locations – anywhere customers need it. Designed and built with AI in mind from the start, it enables organisations to achieve security outcomes beyond what has been possible with humans alone.
With the new solution, Cisco is powering and protecting the engine of the AI revolution – AI-scale data centres and clouds – to make every application and device secure no matter how they are distributed or connected.
How does Cisco Hypershield work?
It 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 data centre. 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.
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.
You mentioned the need for a reimagined architecture to ensure security in AI and data centres, what are the key challenges that customers are facing in today’s cybersecurity complex landscape in the AI era?
AI is revolutionising the role of data centres and the cloud. To cope with the growing demands of AI workloads, data centres need to be redesigned, including scaling, security, and global networking. These changes in network infrastructure have a significant impact on data flow, data processing and the delivery of large amounts of information. This is made even more complex as applications are distributed across thousands of servers located both in data centres and in the cloud. Organisations today need to protect applications, devices, and data everywhere, with the Internet of Things adding a wide variety of physical locations. In this hyper-connected world, Cisco has reimagined security with the first generation of the new solution: Hypershield.
What makes Cisco Hypershield a “first” for the security industry?
We are delivering the first AI-native security solution to protect and scale the data centres of tomorrow.
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 centres is beyond human scale. The innovation leverages a radically new architecture built to secure data centres and clouds in the age of AI. It is nothing like anything that exists because it uses edge processing and a distributed software solution, historically only available to hyperscalers, and makes it available to enterprise IT teams of any size.
How does Cisco Hypershield leverage AI to address customer challenges?
Cisco Hypershield is AI-native. Meaning that it incorporates AI natively into everything it does. It is not just a bolted-on assistant. It was designed from the beginning to harness the power of AI – built to be different in every dimension because of the transformative power of AI.
The new solution uses AI to solve some of the key customer challenges that weren’t solved with cybersecurity for many decades. For example, it is very challenging to keep infrastructure up to date. Organisations constantly have outdated infrastructures because it is so tedious and costly to update them. Ideally, Hypershield eliminates that, the solution does the upgrading itself. Secondly, patching is difficult for enterprises, because from the time that a vulnerability is announced to the time that they have a patch may sometimes take up to 40 days. But with Hypershield, customers can benefit from distributed and almost instantaneous exploit protection. Also, 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.
What does this mean for Cisco’s overall business strategy following the close of Splunk?
Cisco sees the world evolving into three major platforms: One for the endpoint and application, one for the connectivity between the endpoint and the application, and one for security analytics.
With our recent close of Splunk, this evolution becomes even more exciting. Cisco and Splunk are revolutionising the way our customers use data to connect and protect every aspect of their organisation.
Built into the Security Cloud, Cisco’s unified, AI-driven, cross-domain security platform, Cisco Hypershield is built on a cloud-first software infrastructure that allows us deep visibility in the host. It also spans the network, meaning much more telemetry and new insights. With Cisco Hypershield, customers will be able to process more data at the edge – before it is fed into solutions like Splunk – ultimately reducing compute costs. With Cisco’s recent acquisition of Splunk, customers will gain unparalleled visibility and insights across their entire digital footprint for unprecedented security protection.
