Cisco punts network-security integration as key for agentic AI

Cisco is talking up the integration of security into network infrastructure such as its latest Catalyst switches, claiming this is vital to AI applications, and in particular the current vogue for “agentic AI.”

What we did was to imagine if a switch actually had dedicated compute that was isolated, that could run workloads separate from the network traffic forwarding …

During a recent Cisco Innovation Tech Talk hosted by JP Morgan, Switchzilla discussed how it was aiming to support customers developing AI-ready datacenters able to handle the increased traffic forecast for inferencing applications, and in particular operating multiple AI agents across a network.

“Right now as an industry, we’re moving from this era of the version one of AI, which was a bunch of chatbots that intelligently and interactively answered questions that people had, to the new version of AI, which is agents being able to conduct tasks and jobs almost fully autonomously on behalf of humans,” said President and Chief Product Officer Jeetendra “Jeetu” Patel.

This shift means the underlying infrastructure requirements for monitoring, assurance and security in the data fabric will be fundamentally different, or so he claimed.

“If I ask a question of an agent, and it gives me an answer, you might see a spike in inference capacity and volume. But if I have agents autonomously and proactively conducting work behind the scenes, then you’re going to have more sustained demand,” Patel said.

Some of this was also discussed at the Cisco Live conference in San Diego earlier this month, where Cisco unveiled its unified management tool called Cloud Control. There, Patel said the introduction of AI agents would require IT teams to “re-rack the entire datacenter and rebuild the network.”

“We want to be the vendor of choice that does the networking safety and security capabilities for that build-out of the datacenter,” he said in the Tech Talk session, claiming that Cisco developing its own silicon lets it own the full stack, covering everything from the chips to the network infrastructure, to the security infrastructure, to models, to the data platform.

Part of the solution to securing all this busy AI-ready infrastructure will involve using AI itself too, as part of the “agentic ops” approach discussed at the conference. It also involves the smart switches that Cisco announced at its event in Amsterdam in February.

“What we did was to imagine if a switch actually had dedicated compute that was isolated, that could run workloads separate from the network traffic forwarding. That was largely for kind of traffic inspection on security,” Patel said.

“So we announced a smart switch, which is a top-of-rack switch that essentially has a DPU (data processing unit) chip on it from AMD in that switch. And what that allows you to do is analyze live traffic and be able to do a bunch of use cases, but Hypershield, which is our product, is able to get an enforcement point on the switch itself,” he explained.

“We wanted to take security, bake it into the fabric of the network and run it on the switch. And so we were able to do that with the datacenter.”

The idea of integrating security into the network is not new – VMware’s NSX network virtualization has included security functions such as filtering for at least a decade, for example, but Cisco is integrating its capabilities directly into its switch hardware, in a way that should not affect the performance of the switch’s operation.

Cisco likes to think it is onto something big here, with Patel saying this fusion of security and networking is “applicable to any class of customers that we have,” and that “we’re just starting out.”

It’s actually a whole new category of architecture that is going to need explaining to customers, he claimed.

“If you look at our networking friends, they don’t have a security stack. And if you look at our security friends, they don’t have a networking stack. We’re the only ones that have both and what we’ve been able to do is take that stack and combine it together where security is baked into the fabric,” Patel explained.

One of the implications for corporations is that network operations (NetOps) and security operations (SecOps) are effectively being combined, which could lead to some disruption.

But Cisco clearly thinks this is necessary, which it would, as it wants to sell more switches.

“If you think about what is happening right now with AI and this agentic movement, every company in the world is going to actually rethink their workflows with agentic augmentation and agentic automation,” Patel said.

“So, when you start to think about that, there’s going to be a massive level of infrastructure updating that’s going to be required. I think in the fullness of time, you will need to make sure that every datacenter needs to get an architectural shift in how they think about their network, how they think about the network being secure.”

That’s if agentic AI does take off, of course. As The Register found at the HPE Discover show this week, plenty of enterprise customers say they are enthusiastic about the potential of the technology, they just don’t want to be the first in line to try it out. ®

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