Cisco has unveiled Hypershield, an industry-first security architecture designed to address the escalating demands of the AI revolution. As modern workloads and advanced threats outpace traditional security measures, Cisco aims to tip the scales in favour of defenders with this groundbreaking innovation.
“Cisco Hypershield is one of the most significant security innovations in our history,” said Chuck Robbins, Cisco’s Chair and CEO. “With our data advantage and strength in security, infrastructure and observability platforms, Cisco is uniquely positioned to help our customers harness the power of AI.”
At its core, Hypershield is a distributed security fabric that extends far beyond the conventional notion of a perimeter fence. Leveraging technology originally developed for hyperscale public clouds, Hypershield enables security enforcement to be embedded wherever it’s needed – from cloud clusters and virtual machines to factory floors and hospital imaging rooms.
“AI has the potential to empower the world’s 8 billion people to have the same impact as 80 billion. With this abundance, we must reimagine the role of the data centre,” explained Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager for Security and Collaboration at Cisco. “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.”
Hypershield’s security enforcement operates at three layers: software, virtual machines, and network and compute servers/appliances, leveraging hardware accelerators akin to those used in high-performance computing and hyperscale clouds.
Built on three key pillars – AI-native, cloud-native, and hyper-distributed – Hypershield is designed to be autonomous, predictive, and self-managing. It’s founded on open-source eBPF, the default mechanism for connecting and protecting cloud-native workloads in the hyperscale cloud, and incorporates Cisco’s recent acquisition of Isovalent, a leading eBPF provider for enterprises.
Partnering with NVIDIA, Cisco aims to optimise AI-native security solutions that can protect and scale the data centres of tomorrow. This collaboration includes utilising NVIDIA’s Morpheus cybersecurity AI framework for accelerated network anomaly detection and NIM microservices for powering custom security AI assistants.
“Enterprises across all industries are seeking the security that can protect them against ever-expanding cyber threats,” said Kevin Deierling, Senior Vice President of Networking at NVIDIA. “Together, Cisco and NVIDIA are leveraging the power of AI to deliver powerful, incredibly secure data centre infrastructure that will enable enterprises to transform their businesses and benefit customers everywhere.”
Hypershield tackles three key challenges in defending against today’s sophisticated threat landscape: distributed exploit protection, autonomous segmentation, and self-qualifying upgrades.
By automatically testing and deploying compensating controls into the distributed fabric of enforcement points, Hypershield delivers protection in minutes against newly published vulnerabilities, which defenders often struggle to patch promptly.
It also perpetually observes, auto-reasons, and re-evaluates existing policies to autonomously segment the network, preventing lateral movement once an attacker gains a foothold.
Moreover, Hypershield automates the laborious process of testing and deploying upgrades, leveraging a dual data plane to test updates against the customer’s unique traffic, policies, and features before applying them with zero downtime.
“AI is not just a force for good but also a tool used for nefarious purposes, allowing hackers to reverse engineer patches and create exploits in record time,” said Frank Dickson, Group Vice President of Security & Trust at IDC. “Cisco looks to address an AI-enabled problem with an AI solution as Cisco Hypershield aims to tip the scales back in favour of the defender by shielding new vulnerabilities against exploit in minutes – rather than the days, weeks or even months as we wait for patches to actually get deployed.”
Cisco Hypershield, built into the company’s Security Cloud platform, is expected to be generally available in August 2024. With Cisco’s recent acquisition of Splunk, customers will gain unprecedented visibility and insights across their digital footprint for unparalleled security protection.
