Right this moment we launched probably the most consequential safety product in Cisco’s historical past: Cisco Hypershield. It’s a cloud-native, AI-powered method to extremely distributed safety for AI-scale information facilities that’s constructed into the material of the community.
It’s probably the most radically totally different safety innovation I’ve been part of in my profession. A part of the Cisco Safety Cloud, Cisco Hypershield actually turns the community safety mannequin the other way up, bringing the ability of hyperscaler safety and connectivity to the enterprise.
Safety for the Age of AI
AI is ushering in an period of digital abundance. When each particular person in each job perform has AI assistants and organizations are shifting at machine scale, our world of 8 billion will really feel like we have now the capability of 80 billion.
To accommodate the extra digital capability required, our private and non-private information facilities are being reimagined. And Cisco is on the coronary heart of how information facilities are being reimagined: how they’re related, how they’re secured, how they’re operated, and the way they’re scaled.
And information facilities are altering in two main methods. Infrastructure is altering: CPUs are being supplemented with GPUs and DPUs focusing on features like AI workload processing and I/O operations at throughput ranges that trendy AI-scale information facilities want. And purposes are altering: they’re being damaged into 1000’s of microservices that run in several containers and clouds – extremely distributed, all speaking to one another.
On this new world, we have to reimagine safety at AI scale. And we have to do it now, as a result of this evolution of knowledge facilities and purposes isn’t ready for us.
How can we reimagine safety?
Billions spent on cyber safety, and we’re nonetheless falling behind in some ways.
The actual fact is, securing all the pieces is tough. And the unprecedented scale of recent purposes, AI workloads, and units simply makes all the pieces tougher. As an illustration, I used to be lately in India and the nation is rolling out 250 million good energy meters, every of which has the potential to be exploited. This is only one instance of scale that creates tactical challenges for securing all the pieces. Take into account the challenges:
Segmentation is tough when purposes turn into hyper-distributed and are frequently altering.
Patching is tough as a result of it takes a very long time to check, schedule, and deploy a patch to take away a vulnerability. And it’s getting tougher to maintain up as a result of attackers are compressing the time between after they find out about a vulnerability to after they begin exploiting it; it would take just some days and even much less.
Upgrades are arduous as a result of, like patches, they contain handbook testing and deployment. Updrades are particularly arduous after they contain mission-critical infrastructure like an oil rig or a medical robotic, a few of which might’t even be upgraded.
Now, think about you had an answer that would perceive all the pieces your purposes are doing. Then you might have AI outline granular segmentation guidelines for you and preserve them up to date as issues evolve.
Think about you had a approach to discover vulnerabilities and routinely defend them from being exploited. You’d be protected even earlier than you get the possibility to patch.
Think about your safety infrastructure may improve itself. You’d save numerous hours and remove the coordination and downtime of improve testing and deployment home windows.
We designed Cisco Hypershield to do all this and extra. It’s constructed for the age of AI, for the cloud, in software program, and with a distributed structure meaning you may put safety wherever you should….within the cloud, within the information heart, on a manufacturing facility flooring, or a hospital imaging room.
Cisco Hypershield is constructed on trendy constructing blocks like eBPF, {hardware} acceleration, and AI.
Co-created by our new teammates from Isovalent together with Meta, eBPF permits a light-weight agent to look into the guts of the working system, with out really being there. It sits within the consumer house however has a kernel-level impact. This offers Cisco Hypershield full visibility into each software program course of and each I/O operation your distributed purposes are operating in any Kubernetes container or VM. It’s the default mechanism for connecting and defending cloud-native workloads utilized by the hyperscalers.
{Hardware} acceleration. Cisco Hypershield takes benefit of DPUs and different {hardware} accelerators in servers and different community infrastructure. This implies you may place high-performance safety management factors not simply in distributed containers and VMs, however in {hardware} that sits near the workloads they’re defending.
By designing Cisco Hypershield from the bottom as much as leverage the ability of AI, it’s orders-of-magnitude extra autonomous than different safety options. With this AI-first focus in thoughts, we’re enthusiastic about our partnership with NVIDIA. We’re working collectively to co-create security-specific AI fashions, and we’re optimizing our Cisco Safety merchandise for NVIDIA’s know-how.
Bringing safety to the workloads
What the Cisco Hypershield structure delivers is a coordinated cloth of 1000’s of distributed safety enforcement factors all through your whole atmosphere, throughout each private and non-private clouds. It brings safety to the workloads, not the opposite method round.
And this structure permits us to do some actually unbelievable use instances that weren’t potential till now, reminiscent of:
Autonomous segmentation that pulls upon ongoing visibility of community flows, course of behaviors, and utility adjustments to outline granular segmentation guidelines that may shield in opposition to lateral motion. And as issues change over time, Cisco Hypershield refines and updates these guidelines dynamically.
Distributed exploit safety that determines if in case you have a high-risk vulnerability in your atmosphere and delivers a compensating management that may be deployed to dam attackers from exploiting the vulnerability – earlier than you might have an opportunity to patch, and perhaps even earlier than you recognize concerning the vulnerability.
Self-qualifying upgrades that use a shadow information path to check upgrades and coverage adjustments in opposition to a mirror of stay site visitors, examine and ensure the outcomes utilizing AI, and transfer all of the flows to the most recent model – all with none downtime.
I’m extremely excited concerning the launch of Cisco Hypershield. I’m so pleased with our staff for delivering this unbelievable innovation that may assist make the world a safer place.
To be taught extra about it, please learn Tom Gillis’ weblog concerning the know-how and the important thing buyer use instances we’re fixing for. And preserve your suggestions coming!
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