Cisco Launches AI Defense to Help Enterprises Transform with AI
Built for the enterprise, so enterprises can confidently develop, deploy, and secure AI applications.News Highlights:
Cisco’s end-to-end solution protects the development and use of AI applications, so enterprises can move forward with their AI initiatives with confidence.AI Defense protects against the misuse of AI tools, data breaches, and increasingly sophisticated threats that existing security solutions can’t handle.This innovative solution leverages Cisco’s unmatched network visibility and control to stay ahead of evolving AI security and safety issues.SAN JOSE, Calif., January 15, 2025 — Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), a leader in security and networking, today announced Cisco AI Defense, a breakthrough solution that enables and protects AI transformation within the enterprise. As AI advances, new security issues and security threats emerge at an unprecedented rate, and existing security solutions can’t keep up. Cisco AI Defense is built for enterprises, helping them confidently develop, deploy, and secure AI applications.
“When embracing AI, business and technology leaders cannot sacrifice security for speed. In a competitive, fast-changing environment, speed makes the difference. Built into the fabric of the network, Cisco AI Defense combines unique capabilities to detect and defend against threats as AI applications are developed and accessed, without the need to make trade-offs,” said Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and chief product officer at Cisco.
The risk of AI going wrong is extremely high. According to Cisco’s 2024 AI Readiness Index, only 29% of respondents believe they are fully capable of detecting and preventing unauthorized AI tampering. Because AI applications are multi-model and multi-cloud, the security challenges are also new and complex. Vulnerabilities can occur at the model or application level, and responsibility falls on different owners, including developers, end users, and vendors. As enterprises move beyond public data and begin training models on proprietary data, the risks only increase.
To unlock AI innovation and adoption, enterprises need a universal security layer to protect every user and every application. AI Defense supports the AI transformation of enterprises by addressing two pressing risks:
Develop and deploy secure AI applications: As AI becomes ubiquitous, enterprises will use and develop hundreds or even thousands of AI applications. Developers need a set of AI security safeguards that apply to each application. AI Defense helps developers move fast and unlock greater value by protecting AI systems from attacks and securing model behavior across platforms. AI Defense capabilities include:
Discover AI: Security teams need to understand who is building applications and what training sources they use. AI Defense detects shadow AI applications and sanctioned AIapplications in public and private clouds.
Model validation: Model tuning can lead to harmful and unexpected results. Automated testing checks AI models for hundreds of potential security issues. This AI-driven algorithmic red team identifies potential vulnerabilities and recommends guardrails in AI Defense for security teams to use.
Runtime security: Continuous validation provides ongoing protection against potential security threats such as tip injection, denial of service, and sensitive data leakage.Securing access to AI applications: As end users adopt AI applications such as summarization tools to increase productivity, security teams need to prevent data breaches and poisoning of proprietary data. AI Defense provides security teams with the following capabilities:
Visibility: Provides a comprehensive view of shadow and approved AI applications used by employees.
Access control: Enforces policies that limit employee access to unapproved AI tools.
Data and threat protection: Continuously protect against threats and loss of confidential data while ensuring compliance.
Unlike security guardrails built into individual AI models, Cisco provides consistent controls for a multi-model world. AI Defense is self-optimizing, leveraging Cisco’s proprietary machine learning models to detect evolving AI security issues based on threat intelligence data from Cisco Talos. Splunk customers using AI Defense will receive enriched alerts and more context from across the ecosystem. AI Defense seamlessly integrates with existing data flows, provides unparalleled visibility and control, and is built into Cisco’s unified AI-driven cross-domain security platform, Security Cloud. It leverages Cisco’s extensive network of enforcement points to enforce AIsecurity at the network level in a way that only Cisco can provide. Accuracy and trustworthiness are critical to protecting enterprise AI applications, and Cisco has been actively involved in setting industry standards for AI security, including those from MITRE, OWASP, and NIST.