Cisco makes AI infrastructure push with Hypershield announcement

New tech leverages NVIDIA partnership

In a push to ensure its leadership in the AI security race, Cisco has announced a new solution for safeguarding cloud and datacentre applications and devices.

Announced today, Cisco Hypershield aims to address the challenge of securing distributed attack surfaces across applications, devices and data.

Current datacentre infrastructure is ill-equipped to manage this immense data volume and accompanying security complexities likely to be brought on by the widespread proliferation of AI.

According to Cisco, it has bridged this gap, with a solution that incorporates security directly into the fabric of the datacentre.

Positioned as a boon for cyber-security teams, Hypershield incorporates what the company refers to as "native" AI, allowing companies to maximise the time of their security engineers.

"Hypershield is a game-changer in the realm of cybersecurity, enabling organisations to achieve security outcomes beyond what has been possible with humans alone," said Jeetu Patel, EVP and GM for security and collaboration at Cisco, during a media preview of the solution.

The tech leverages Cisco's NVIDIA partnerships and, according to Patel, is designed to work best on the NVIDIA stack.

"We're extending our partnership with Nvidia to build security-specific models. And our technology works much better on the NVIDIA stack. As we go forward, we will continue to make sure that we work in a highly collaborative way with the ecosystem."

According to Cisco, Hypershield represents a the next step in security architecture, leveraging AI-native capabilities to autonomously segment networks and provide distributed, near-real-time exploit protection without the need for traditional patches.

The solution also offers self-qualifying software upgrades with no downtime.

"We're excited about the possibilities that Hypershield brings to the table. It's built with technology originally developed for hyperscale public clouds and is now available for enterprise IT teams of all sizes," added Patel.

"Hypershield spans all clouds and leverages hardware acceleration like Data Processing Units (DPU) to analyse and respond to anomalies in application and network behavior. It shifts security closer to the workloads that need protection."

Key features of Hypershield include its AI-native design, cloud infrastructure, and distributed approach.

Expected to be generally available in August 2024, Hypershield will be integrated into Cisco's unified security platform.