Cisco has a plan to restructure your business security as you know it

[[{“value”:”

Cisco has unveiled a new AI-powered cybersecurity platform it says can provide an “unprecedented” update to business protection.

The new Cisco Hypershield architecture wa originally developed for hyperscale public clouds, but has now been repurposed for enterprise IT teams of all sizes.

The company promises security enforcement “everywhere it needs to be”, including application services in the datacenter, Kubernetes clusters in the public cloud, containers, and virtual machines.

Solving customer problems

Hypershield was designed to solve three major customer pain points, Cisco says, testing and deploying upgrades, doing it faster than hackers can exploit flaws, and segmenting a compromised network to contain the threats.

The platform will also automatically test and deploy compensating controls into the distributed fabric of enforcement points, in order to move faster than the attackers.

It will perpetually observe, auto-reason and re-evaluate existing policies to autonomously segment the network, and will automate the “incredibly laborious and time-consuming process” of testing and deploying upgrades, once they’re ready.

Further explaining how Hypershield operates, Cisco said security enforcement happens at three different layers: in software, in virtual machines, and in network and compute servers and appliances.

It was built to be AI-native, cloud-native, and hyper-distributed, and as such, it should be autonomous and predictive from the get-go, managing itself once it earns trust. Furthermore, it was designed on open-source eBPF, the default mechanism for connecting and protecting cloud-native workloads in the hyperscale cloud.

“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,” said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager for Security and Collaboration at Cisco.