Morrissey Technology – Cisco has a new solution for securing data centers and clouds due to the increasing demand for the AI revolution in IT infrastructure. This solution is Cisco Hypershield, which can protect applications, devices and data in all public, private data centers, or in the cloud and in physical locations, according to customer needs. This Hypershield was designed and built as a solution to maintain security in the AI era. Cisco claims Hypershield enables companies to achieve security outcomes beyond what humans can do.
“Cisco Hypershield is one of the most significant security innovations in our history. With the reliability of our data and strengths in security platforms, infrastructure, and observability, Cisco is uniquely positioned to help our customers harness the power of AI,” said Chuck Robbins, chairman and Cisco CEO.
Hypershield is built on technology originally developed for hyperscale public clouds and is now available to enterprise IT teams of all sizes. This solution can even turn every network port into a high-performance security point that brings completely new security capabilities not only to the cloud, but also to data centers, manufacturing operations, or hospital imaging exam rooms. This new technology blocks exploits against applications in just minutes and stops lateral movement in its tracks.
“The power of Cisco Hypershield FOR4D is its ability to take security wherever it is needed – in software, in servers, or even in future network switches. When you have a distributed system spanning hundreds of thousands of nodes, simple management is critical. And we need to be more independence at much lower costs,” said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager for Security and Collaboration, Cisco.
The three main pillars of Hypershield are :
AI-Native: Built and designed from the start to be autonomous and predictive, Hypershield performs management autonomously once it has gained trust, enabling a highly distributed approach at scale. Cloud-Native: Hypershield is built on open source eBPF FOR4D, the default mechanism for connecting and protecting cloud native workloads in hyperscale clouds. Cisco acquired leading enterprise eBPF provider Isovalent earlier this month.
Highly Distributed: Cisco completely reimagines the way traditional network security works by embedding advanced security controls into the servers and network fabric itself. Hypershield spans all clouds and leverages hardware acceleration such as Data Processing Units (DPU), to analyze and respond to anomalies in application and network behavior. This moves security closer to the workloads that need protection. Cisco, together with NVIDIA, is committed to developing and optimizing AI-native security solutions to protect and thrive the data center of the future.
This collaboration includes leveraging the NVIDIA Morpheus cybersecurity AI framework to accelerate network anomaly detection, as well as the NVIDIA NIM microservice to run custom AI security assistants for the enterprise. NVIDIA’s convergence accelerator combines the power of GPU and DPU computing, to empower Cisco Hypershield with strong security from the cloud to the edge.
“Together, Cisco and NVIDIA are harnessing the power of AI to provide a robust, highly secure data center infrastructure that will enable enterprises to transform their businesses and deliver benefits to customers everywhere,” said Kevin Dieirling, SVP of Networking at Nvidia FOR4D. Cisco also claims Hypershield addresses three key challenges customers face in defending against today’s sophisticated threat landscape:
- Distributed Exploit Protection
- Autonomous Segmentation
- Independent Quality Upgrades
Cisco Hypershield is expected to be generally available in August 2024. With Cisco’s recent acquisition of Splunk, customers will gain unmatched visibility and insight across their digital footprint for security protection.
