Latest news with #JeetuPatel
Web Release
7 hours ago
- Business
- Web Release
Cisco Duo Reimagines Identity Security to Combat AI Era Threats
Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), the leader in security and networking, today unveiled Duo Identity and Access Management (IAM), a new security solution that transforms how organizations combat persistent identity-based attacks that are accelerating in the AI era. Identity is a prime target for bad actors, accounting for 60% of Cisco Talos Incident Response cases in 2024, because current solutions have critical weaknesses that attackers exploit. Duo IAM offers an innovative and security-first approach, with added protection built on its globally trusted multifactor authentication (MFA). Duo IAM is the latest advancement in Cisco's long-standing commitment to user-friendly Zero Trust security. 'The security industry is facing an 'identity crisis' as persistent identity-based attacks are among the most dangerous and costly challenges for security teams. Attackers don't need to hack in, when they can simply log in,' said Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco. 'While identity is the foundation of strong security, traditional IAM solutions have failed to prioritize security despite increasingly sophisticated threats. With this massive innovation, Duo is moving beyond MFA and restoring trust in identity security with a fundamentally different approach that attackers hate and users love.' Security-First Identity and Access Management According to Cisco's 2025 Cybersecurity Readiness Index, nearly a third of companies worldwide rank identity as their top cybersecurity challenge, but traditional IAM solutions often treat security as optional rather than foundational. Purpose-built to protect against modern identity threats, Duo IAM enables organizations to securely manage their entire identity infrastructure. Duo includes a new User Directory to simplify storing user identities – including usernames, emails, and roles – and managing their access to resources. Paired with its existing capabilities including MFA and Single Sign On (SSO) to provide users with simple, easy and secure access to hundreds of applications from one login page, Duo now offers customers a comprehensive IAM solution. Open and flexible, Duo IAM also integrates effortlessly with existing third-party identity systems. The new Identity Routing Engine allows Duo to integrate with many identity providers either as an identity broker or as a secondary identity provider. Incorporating security by default, Duo IAM frustrates attackers, while improving user experience and management costs. The Cisco AI Assistant is embedded in Duo to help organizations easily deploy and manage the new solution out-of-the-box. End-to-End Phishing-Resistance AI has accelerated the scale and complexity of account takeover through automated agentic social engineering. In response to rising threats, globally trusted Duo MFA now delivers the strongest form of authentication, without sacrificing convenience or purchasing expensive hardware keys. Recent innovations strengthening end-to-end phishing resistance include: Complete Passwordless : New option ensures a secure authentication experience without users ever having to use or remember a password. : New option ensures a secure authentication experience without users ever having to use or remember a password. Proximity Verification : This capability uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to ensure a user's mobile and access devices are near each other when authenticating. : This capability uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to ensure a user's mobile and access devices are near each other when authenticating. Session Theft Protection: New enhancements to Duo Passport remove the reliance on browser cookies from authentication, protecting against session theft and hijacking. Unified Identity Intelligence Identity infrastructure is complex and often disconnected, creating blind spots where attacks and vulnerabilities go unnoticed. To help organizations continuously monitor and respond to changes in identity risk, Duo IAM integrates with Cisco Identity Intelligence, connecting identity and access data across the Cisco Security Cloud platform. With AI-driven behavioral analytics and Cisco's unmatched reach into the network, organizations gain comprehensive visibility, threat detection, and the ability to take graduated responses like quarantining an identity, killing active sessions or isolating the network. 'Cisco Duo has been a trusted security partner when it comes to MFA, and in today's environment we're eager to use these new capabilities to fight growing identity-based attacks,' said Todd Perrault, Senior Vice President of Client Advisory, Optiv. 'Duo's expanding suite of identity and access management solutions will deliver even stronger results for our customers with a security-first approach to identity while providing reduced friction for end users.' 'Identity breaches are no longer the exception—they're the rule. Seeing a trusted security brand like Duo broaden from access management to include identity management and provide a security-first approach in the market is both timely and refreshing,' said Todd Thiemann, Principal Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. 'Duo's commitment to maximizing security while minimizing user and admin friction is exactly what the industry needs. In particular, their approach to end-to-end phishing resistance marks a major leap forward, not just in security, but also in ease of deployment, to combat the latest identity threats.' For more information about Duo and its new IAM solution, visit
Zawya
8 hours ago
- Business
- Zawya
Cisco Duo reimagines identity security to combat AI era threats
Cisco Duo unveiled an innovative, security-first Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution. Duo IAM protects against modern AI-driven identity threats, while maintaining user productivity. Building on its globally trusted multifactor authentication (MFA), Duo IAM sets a new standard for end-to-end phishing resistance without expensive hardware keys. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), the leader in security and networking, today unveiled Duo Identity and Access Management (IAM), a new security solution that transforms how organizations combat persistent identity-based attacks that are accelerating in the AI era. Identity is a prime target for bad actors, accounting for 60% of Cisco Talos Incident Response cases in 2024, because current solutions have critical weaknesses that attackers exploit. Duo IAM offers an innovative and security-first approach, with added protection built on its globally trusted multifactor authentication (MFA). Duo IAM is the latest advancement in Cisco's long-standing commitment to user-friendly Zero Trust security. 'The security industry is facing an 'identity crisis' as persistent identity-based attacks are among the most dangerous and costly challenges for security teams. Attackers don't need to hack in, when they can simply log in,' said Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco. 'While identity is the foundation of strong security, traditional IAM solutions have failed to prioritize security despite increasingly sophisticated threats. With this massive innovation, Duo is moving beyond MFA and restoring trust in identity security with a fundamentally different approach that attackers hate and users love.' Security-First Identity and Access Management According to Cisco's 2025 Cybersecurity Readiness Index, nearly a third of companies worldwide rank identity as their top cybersecurity challenge, but traditional IAM solutions often treat security as optional rather than foundational. Purpose-built to protect against modern identity threats, Duo IAM enables organizations to securely manage their entire identity infrastructure. Duo includes a new User Directory to simplify storing user identities – including usernames, emails, and roles – and managing their access to resources. Paired with its existing capabilities including MFA and Single Sign On (SSO) to provide users with simple, easy and secure access to hundreds of applications from one login page, Duo now offers customers a comprehensive IAM solution. Open and flexible, Duo IAM also integrates effortlessly with existing third-party identity systems. The new Identity Routing Engine allows Duo to integrate with many identity providers either as an identity broker or as a secondary identity provider. Incorporating security by default, Duo IAM frustrates attackers, while improving user experience and management costs. The Cisco AI Assistant is embedded in Duo to help organizations easily deploy and manage the new solution out-of-the-box. End-to-End Phishing-Resistance AI has accelerated the scale and complexity of account takeover through automated agentic social engineering. In response to rising threats, globally trusted Duo MFA now delivers the strongest form of authentication, without sacrificing convenience or purchasing expensive hardware keys. Recent innovations strengthening end-to-end phishing resistance include: Complete Passwordless: New option ensures a secure authentication experience without users ever having to use or remember a password. Proximity Verification: This capability uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to ensure a user's mobile and access devices are near each other when authenticating. Session Theft Protection: New enhancements to Duo Passport remove the reliance on browser cookies from authentication, protecting against session theft and hijacking. Unified Identity Intelligence Identity infrastructure is complex and often disconnected, creating blind spots where attacks and vulnerabilities go unnoticed. To help organizations continuously monitor and respond to changes in identity risk, Duo IAM integrates with Cisco Identity Intelligence, connecting identity and access data across the Cisco Security Cloud platform. With AI-driven behavioral analytics and Cisco's unmatched reach into the network, organizations gain comprehensive visibility, threat detection, and the ability to take graduated responses like quarantining an identity, killing active sessions or isolating the network. 'Cisco Duo has been a trusted security partner when it comes to MFA, and in today's environment we're eager to use these new capabilities to fight growing identity-based attacks,' said Todd Perrault, Senior Vice President of Client Advisory, Optiv. 'Duo's expanding suite of identity and access management solutions will deliver even stronger results for our customers with a security-first approach to identity while providing reduced friction for end users.' 'Identity breaches are no longer the exception—they're the rule. Seeing a trusted security brand like Duo broaden from access management to include identity management and provide a security-first approach in the market is both timely and refreshing,' said Todd Thiemann, Principal Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. 'Duo's commitment to maximizing security while minimizing user and admin friction is exactly what the industry needs. In particular, their approach to end-to-end phishing resistance marks a major leap forward, not just in security, but also in ease of deployment, to combat the latest identity threats.' For more information about Duo and its new IAM solution, visit About Cisco Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide technology leader that is revolutionizing the way organizations connect and protect in the AI era. For more than 40 years, Cisco has securely connected the world. With its industry leading AI-powered solutions and services, Cisco enables its customers, partners and communities to unlock innovation, enhance productivity and strengthen digital resilience. With purpose at its core, Cisco remains committed to creating a more connected and inclusive future for all. Discover more on The Newsroom and follow us on X at @Cisco. Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word 'partner' does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company.
Zawya
11 hours ago
- Business
- Zawya
Cisco Duo unveils next-gen identity protection amid rising AI threats
Cisco Duo unveiled an innovative, security-first Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution. Duo IAM protects against modern AI-driven identity threats, while maintaining user productivity. Building on its globally trusted multifactor authentication (MFA), Duo IAM sets a new standard for end-to-end phishing resistance without expensive hardware keys. Dubai, UAE – Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), the leader in security and networking, today unveiled Duo Identity and Access Management (IAM), a new security solution that transforms how organizations combat persistent identity-based attacks that are accelerating in the AI era. Identity is a prime target for bad actors, accounting for 60% of Cisco Talos Incident Response cases in 2024, because current solutions have critical weaknesses that attackers exploit. Duo IAM offers an innovative and security-first approach, with added protection built on its globally trusted multifactor authentication (MFA). Duo IAM is the latest advancement in Cisco's long-standing commitment to user-friendly Zero Trust security. 'The security industry is facing an 'identity crisis' as persistent identity-based attacks are among the most dangerous and costly challenges for security teams. Attackers don't need to hack in, when they can simply log in,' said Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco. 'While identity is the foundation of strong security, traditional IAM solutions have failed to prioritize security despite increasingly sophisticated threats. With this massive innovation, Duo is moving beyond MFA and restoring trust in identity security with a fundamentally different approach that attackers hate and users love.' Security-First Identity and Access Management According to Cisco's 2025 Cybersecurity Readiness Index, nearly a third of companies worldwide rank identity as their top cybersecurity challenge, but traditional IAM solutions often treat security as optional rather than foundational. Purpose-built to protect against modern identity threats, Duo IAM enables organizations to securely manage their entire identity infrastructure. Duo includes a new User Directory to simplify storing user identities – including usernames, emails, and roles – and managing their access to resources. Paired with its existing capabilities including MFA and Single Sign On (SSO) to provide users with simple, easy and secure access to hundreds of applications from one login page, Duo now offers customers a comprehensive IAM solution. Open and flexible, Duo IAM also integrates effortlessly with existing third-party identity systems. The new Identity Routing Engine allows Duo to integrate with many identity providers either as an identity broker or as a secondary identity provider. Incorporating security by default, Duo IAM frustrates attackers, while improving user experience and management costs. The Cisco AI Assistant is embedded in Duo to help organizations easily deploy and manage the new solution out-of-the-box. End-to-End Phishing-Resistance AI has accelerated the scale and complexity of account takeover through automated agentic social engineering. In response to rising threats, globally trusted Duo MFA now delivers the strongest form of authentication, without sacrificing convenience or purchasing expensive hardware keys. Recent innovations strengthening end-to-end phishing resistance include: Complete Passwordless: New option ensures a secure authentication experience without users ever having to use or remember a password. Proximity Verification: This capability uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to ensure a user's mobile and access devices are near each other when authenticating. Session Theft Protection: New enhancements to Duo Passport remove the reliance on browser cookies from authentication, protecting against session theft and hijacking. Unified Identity Intelligence Identity infrastructure is complex and often disconnected, creating blind spots where attacks and vulnerabilities go unnoticed. To help organizations continuously monitor and respond to changes in identity risk, Duo IAM integrates with Cisco Identity Intelligence, connecting identity and access data across the Cisco Security Cloud platform. With AI-driven behavioral analytics and Cisco's unmatched reach into the network, organizations gain comprehensive visibility, threat detection, and the ability to take graduated responses like quarantining an identity, killing active sessions or isolating the network. 'Cisco Duo has been a trusted security partner when it comes to MFA, and in today's environment we're eager to use these new capabilities to fight growing identity-based attacks,' said Todd Perrault, Senior Vice President of Client Advisory, Optiv. 'Duo's expanding suite of identity and access management solutions will deliver even stronger results for our customers with a security-first approach to identity while providing reduced friction for end users.' 'Identity breaches are no longer the exception—they're the rule. Seeing a trusted security brand like Duo broaden from access management to include identity management and provide a security-first approach in the market is both timely and refreshing,' said Todd Thiemann, Principal Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. 'Duo's commitment to maximizing security while minimizing user and admin friction is exactly what the industry needs. In particular, their approach to end-to-end phishing resistance marks a major leap forward, not just in security, but also in ease of deployment, to combat the latest identity threats.' For more information about Duo and its new IAM solution, visit About Cisco Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide technology leader that is revolutionizing the way organizations connect and protect in the AI era. For more than 40 years, Cisco has securely connected the world. With its industry leading AI-powered solutions and services, Cisco enables its customers, partners and communities to unlock innovation, enhance productivity and strengthen digital resilience. With purpose at its core, Cisco remains committed to creating a more connected and inclusive future for all. Discover more on The Newsroom and follow us on X at @Cisco. Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word 'partner' does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company.
Forbes
20-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Cisco Live 2025 Touts Cisco's Platform Advantages For Enterprise AI
Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel presents at Cisco Live 2025. At last week's Cisco Live in San Diego, CEO Chuck Robbins said that it would be the most important Cisco Live ever and announce more innovations than ever. Having attended a ton of these events and followed the company closely for many years, I can tell you that the show mostly fulfilled that promise. More than that, it reinforced Cisco's areas of strategic focus in infrastructure, the modern workplace and digital resiliency. It's clear that Cisco is working hard to leverage its platform advantages across networking, security, observability, compute and even silicon to support agentic AI workloads. This should help customers simplify operations while maintaining the highest levels of network security and AI safety. As I pointed out in my analysis of the Cisco Partner Summit held late in 2024, Cisco was very deliberate — perhaps a touch slow — in establishing its overarching AI strategy. By now, though, I'm impressed with how quickly the company has been moving to bring this strategy to fruition. Let's dig into the details of what Cisco is doing, and what it could still do better. (Note: Cisco is an advisory client of my firm, Moor Insights & Strategy.) Cisco's Strategic Imperatives, Per Robbins And Patel Early on, Robbins made the fundamental point that networking is critical for AI to function, and will be a big factor in enabling AI growth going forward. Beyond that, agentic AI will be adequately secured only by applying security to the network. In this context, Robbins scored a direct hit on Cisco's competitors when he pointed out that 'None of our network friends have security and none of our security friends have networking.' He believes (and I agree) that this puts Cisco in a unique position to help integrate security into the network, which I think is going to be especially important in enterprise IT. AI is growing like wildfire against a backdrop of global turmoil. Robbins said that geopolitical dynamics are a big concern for Cisco, noting that AI competition isn't just between companies, but between nations as well. Whether companies or countries, everyone has FOMO, and everyone feels like they need to move fast. (He said that 85% of enterprises believe they must 'do AI' in the next 18 months.) This reminds me that most of my conversations at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos were spent discussing countries' needs for a disconnected, sovereign AI cloud. The need is there. A new type of infrastructure will be required to realize the potential of generative and especially agentic AI. According to Robbins, we need a similar kind of advancement in infrastructure that happened when the internet became ubiquitous in the 1990s. It's worth pausing here to reflect on how important that period of technology was for turning Cisco into a networking juggernaut. Here in the 2020s, this is going to play out with a hybrid strategy that includes both cloud hyperscalers and private enterprise datacenters. For meeting this need, Robbins told the crowd not to underestimate the impact of Cisco's combined strengths in networking, security and silicon. (In my view, Cisco needs to talk more often and in more detail about the silicon part. I'll come back to that in my recommendations at the end of this article.) After the CEO's keynote was done, Cisco's chief product officer — and newly appointed president — Jeetu Patel took the stage and echoed Robbins with his emphasis on: He later gave much more detail on each of those facets, as I'll cover below. But first he talked about how the ability of AI agents to autonomously execute tasks will compound productivity, especially when combined with advances in robotics, AI and other areas. As he put it, '8 billion [people] will feel like 80 billion.' However, this productivity explosion will be constrained by limits in power, networking and compute. He also foresees a growing divide between companies that are dexterous with AI and those that will struggle. 'We want to help you be in that first category,' Patel said. He's making a very timely prediction. I presented to a group of European CIOs earlier this week in Munich, and one of the slides showed logos of companies that 'died' from not embracing the internet and e-commerce. The same will happen to companies that don't quickly embrace AI. You don't have to be first, but you can't be last. How can Cisco help? Patel brought it back to the compounding effect of Cisco's platform approach, where many different types of complementary technology work 'in harmony.' He referenced the company's silicon (so customers aren't stuck with a single provider) and especially programmable silicon (to adapt to new use cases). He also reiterated a point he had made in the 2024 Cisco Partner Summit — that AI is foundational to Cisco's products, so customers can expect it to be built right in. While I think that's an accurate thing to say, I would also suggest that by now it's not such a point of differentiation. The Need For AI-Ready Infrastructure Patel went into more detail about the massive, even exponential, buildout of datacenters underway right now. He said that Cisco is foundational in building out these new datacenters. For datacenters to support large-scale agentic AI, they need a new architecture that can support the constant high levels of AI model activity that agentic creates. This is unlike generative AI chatbots, where the activity spikes up and down. Patel believes that the company can take advantage of the opportunity based on the experience it has gained from many years of serving hyperscalers/CSPs, neoclouds and enterprise customers. In support of my praise for Cisco's impressive speed lately, Patel touted the 19 major datacenter innovations the company has launched just within the past six months. At Cisco Live, it announced the unified Nexus Dashboard, which creates 'one brain for all of our data center fabrics,' according to Patel. There was also plenty of talk about the company's partnership with AI bellwether Nvidia. Among other aspects of the pairing, Cisco switches are completely integrated into Nvidia architecture, and Nvidia NeMo models can be secured with Cisco AI Defense. As I have said before, I am a recovering product management and product marketing executive, and I always challenge tech companies to describe their product realization process. While Cisco gets criticized for its 'legacy' roots, Patel has very much changed the product culture there. Fewer layers and faster time-to-decision. Most of the new software underlying AI was developed by small teams with six to eight members. This is a new practice — and very much a new Cisco. I will be digging more into the metrics and outcomes as they're available, but I like what I hear so far. Given that this is Cisco we're talking about, that was just the tip of the iceberg for cybersecurity. Patel described security as a prerequisite for enterprise AI because 'If people don't trust the system, they're not going to use it.' There was also an announcement about the Hybrid Mesh Firewall, which enables distributed policy enforcement, adds security to all sorts of devices and can work with existing firewalls (even from third parties). There were other announcements of specific firewalls, and Patel asserted that Cisco is the price-performance leader for firewalls at every level of scale. The company also launched a new secure network architecture called Cisco Live Protect, which is meant to shield your network from an exploit within minutes to give your IT security team time to fix the underlying issue. The contrast between 'within minutes' and the industrywide 45-day average to patch a vulnerability is striking, to say the least. You can read more in this analysis from my colleague Will Townsend, who's an expert on networking and cybersecurity. Our colleague Matt Kimball, who has a long background in datacenters, will also be publishing his analysis soon. Networking And Equipping The Workplace Of Tomorrow This part of the presentation bridged various aspects of networking for enterprises, where Patel said the priorities were operational simplicity, scalability and — once again — security infused into the network. He got some cheers when he announced that Cisco's Catalyst switches are now unified with its Meraki network platform; there's now a single dashboard for managing these along with all of Cisco's next-gen devices. From my perspective, this is a nice example of Cisco's growing emphasis on easing the customer/user experience. In that vein, there was also an impressive demo of the new AgenticOps platform, which includes a multiplayer management console called AI Canvas. Will Townsend wrote much more about this in his article, praising its 'dynamic and real-time view into the inner workings of a customer's infrastructure expanse' to manage the network assurance, observability and remediation supplied by other Cisco tools. The live demo showed a user fetching data on a network outage and making UI widgets in real time to manage it. The engineer using it walked through troubleshooting, then inviting other users to help — with an autogenerated AI summary of what had been done so far. The AI model recognized missing data and looked for it, and then it was easy to apply a patch straight from the dashboard. Even a non-engineer like me could see immediately how helpful this console would be. Patel is not afraid to use hyperbole when it's warranted, so he summarized the impact of AgenticOps by saying, 'The way in which you run your network will never be the same again.' And he promised that much more innovation like this is coming through the pipeline. There was a lot more, including 'one of the largest refreshes of networking devices in Cisco history.' This includes smart switches, secure routers, WiFi 7 gear, campus gateways, industrial IoT . . . if you can network it, Cisco wants to do it smarter. For example, the new smart switches have isolated compute so you can run things like security right on the switch, plus all of the devices act as sensors that provide information about their environment back to the system. Harnessing Data And AI To Fortify Digital Resilience When the conversation turned to digital resilience, Patel and other presenters continued the theme of bringing more data into the picture to keep infrastructure running well. Enterprises routinely expend many hours determining the causes of outages; in Patel's view, the friction of this process is created by not having the right data available. 'One of the reasons we acquired Splunk for the low price of $28 billion,' he said, 'was to take all this data across multiple domains and correlate it.' He added that the core method of digital resilience is to distill data, correlate it, then unleash AI on the problem. There were plenty of specifics in terms of new launches, new Splunk integrations and so on, not to mention using smaller, more efficient bespoke AI models for specific security needs. (Those Cisco folks really are building AI into everything.) But for me there were two big takeaways from this part of the show. First is the idea of reimagining security operations by performing security at machine scale, and consolidating and simplifying security solutions to make that easier. Second is the extension of observability to AI. Some aspects of AI may still be 'black boxes' in terms of what the algorithms are doing, but Cisco wants to give its customers the ability to see everything their AIs are doing in terms of compute usage, network traffic, power draw and so on. If the company is able to pull off everything talked about onstage, I think that can only help with operationalizing AI to yield real business results for enterprises. Messaging All This AI Innovation Cisco Live reminds me a little bit of Google Cloud Next in terms of the sheer number of announcements packed into a couple of days. And it makes sense, given that both Cisco and Google Cloud (a) operate across multiple product areas with many different individual offerings in them, and (b) are investing enormous amounts of bandwidth (and capex) into AI — at speed. There are a couple of risks I see for Cisco. First, yes, the company's leaders told us repeatedly that AI is 'foundational' in their products. But it's one thing to claim this — as do most of the big infrastructure providers and enterprise software vendors. And the demos were great. But it's another thing to accurately engage with the market as a whole and with individual customers to help them understand the many potential payoffs for Cisco's AI innovations, area by area and product by product. I have great faith in Cisco's go-to-market prowess, but there's so much coming down the pike so fast that, to be most successful, the company needs to do the very best job of explaining its wares that it's ever done. Maybe it's my background in semiconductors talking, but I see this especially in how Cisco talks about its in-house silicon. In my view, Cisco doesn't blow this trumpet as loudly or as often as it should. The company announced its Silicon One initiative in 2019, and has been shipping its own chips for years by this point . . . yet there still aren't enough people who know about it. And look at the valuations of AI chip companies today. So I urge the company to talk more about its chips and how they add to the differentiation of Cisco's portfolio. The good news is, the introduction of all this AI functionality from Cisco — and the sea change underway in AI datacenter infrastructure — offers a perfect opportunity to do this. Cisco has some unique advantages in the market, starting with Chuck Robbins' correct and fundamental assertion that no one else in networking can match Cisco in security, and no one else in cybersecurity can match Cisco for networking. I'm also impressed by the waves of smart, relevant, user-friendly products I see at each Cisco event I attend. Now I want to see just how well Cisco can market, message and sell all this goodness into the enterprise.
Fast Company
19-06-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
How Cisco has been quietly retooling for the AI revolution
Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company 's weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week here. Exclusive Interview With Cisco's Jeetu Patel Data centers are popping up all over the world to support the quickly growing demand for all kinds of AI apps and services. Cisco, of course, is no stranger to the data center, and it's been working hard over the past few years to make itself a vital part of the AI technology stack. I asked Cisco EVP and chief product officer Jeetu Patel how he sees the current situation in generative AI, and about how his company fits into the picture. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Can you give me your 30,000-foot view of the transition to generative AI? We're now moving from this mode of chatbots intelligently answering questions for us to us now moving into a mode where agents are conducting tasks and jobs almost fully autonomously on behalf of humans. As that happens, there's going to be an augmentation of the capacity of billions and billions of agents that'll actually get added on over the course of the next few years. But the requirements that you have around low-latency, high-performance, high-energy-efficiency infrastructure, as well as around safety and security so that the user can establish trust with these AI systems, is going to have to be fully reimagined. Can you describe in simple terms how Cisco plays in the AI tech stack? At the very baseline, we build our own silicon and ASICs [application-specific integrated circuits] for the network itself. I think we're the only non-Nvidia silicon provider that is part of Nvidia's reference architecture where our networking is tied with their GPUs and we actually make sure that those work together in a reference architecture that an enterprise can deploy. We then have our own systems, which are the physical boxes for the networks and the servers on the compute side, and the optics and the optical systems that actually can do ultra-long haul data center interconnect, as well as interconnect between clusters. We then provide the safety and security platform that's needed to secure AI as well—we're one of the largest security players in the market. We provide a data platform in Splunk. We're actually building our own bespoke custom models for security and networking. You mentioned latency as a key challenge. How critical is response time for AI applications? If it takes three seconds for an AI voice agent to respond to you, you know it's a robot and you don't want to talk to it. But if you do it within 500 milliseconds, you have a very different kind of behavior from the human. In our user testing, outside of efficacy, latency is one of the most important things. It has to be interruptible and it has to have enough training on EQ [emotional intelligence] and sentiment analysis, so that if you're sounding annoyed, it doesn't say, 'How's the weather today?' How do you handle the security challenges with multiple AI models? Most of these models are putting their own safety and security guardrails in the models. But models can get tricked through jailbreaking techniques. We've built a product that not only does the visibility of what data is flowing through the model and when the model is getting fine-tuned, so you can do a continuous validation. . . . We validate the model within a matter of minutes through an algorithmic red-teaming exercise rather than it taking weeks or months for companies to validate the model. We jailbroke DeepSeek within 48 hours. We can take that model and then create runtime enforcement guardrails for every application developer. The end outcome is that no developer has to rebuild the security stack every time they build an application, and no model provider needs to be responsible for every single way that a model can be jailbroken. So every app developer building on top of DeepSeek will benefit from this pool of knowledge that Cisco knows about how to jailbreak the model and how to protect against that? That's exactly right. We believe that you need a neutral party that provides a common substrate of security for every app developer, every model builder, every agent developer, so that the developer can innovate fearlessly. Are AI companies putting big data centers in the Middle East because they have plenty of power and room to grow, or is it to better service customers in that region? It's literally both. You don't have enough power to fuel all the demand for AI right now. The amount of usage that OpenAI is getting right now is literally like breaking the internet. They came up with $20 a user—they're losing money on $20 a user, from what the industry says. So they added a plan for $200 a user. My guess is they're going to lose money at $200 a user. They have a plan for $2,000 a user. They will lose money for $2,000 a user. Tha''s not a bad thing. It tells you that there is intrinsic demand. The demand for data centers is going to be insatiable for a very long time. As models get more efficient over time, you'll have small models with very large context windows—you might have a million-token context window, very small model, very small data set with a very small footprint to be able to get the inference done. But we're not quite there yet. Is it because of inference costs that they can't make money? What's the big cost driver? Right now it's the usage and the cost of GPUs. It's expensive. But the beauty about this is it's the wrong thing to focus on to get a company to profitability at this stage. What they should focus on is the acquisition of as many users as possible so that they can have the daily workflow fusion of ChatGPT for both consumers and enterprises. Once that happens, they can figure out a way to optimize later. But right now, starting to optimize would be putting cycles in the wrong thing.
