Cisco Amplifies AI Security With AI Defense

‘The companies that are making great use of AI currently, they’re being held back by the safety and security of AI as one of the key impediments to accelerated adoption,’ Cisco EVP and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel says of the tech giant’s new offering, AI Defense.

Cisco Systems knows that one of the biggest barriers holding up AI application development and deployment today is security. That’s why the tech giant, with the help of some technology from a recent acquisition, has unveiled AI Defense for partners and end customers.

“There’s going to be two types of companies in the world. There’s going to be companies that know how to make great use of AI, and then there are companies that will be irrelevant. The companies that are making great use of AI currently, they’re being held back by the safety and security of AI as one of the key impediments to accelerated adoption,” Jeetu Patel, Cisco's executive vice president and chief product officer, told CRN.

AI Defense, introduced during Cisco’s AI Summit in San Jose, Calif., Wednesday, safeguards enterprises against the misuse of AI tools, data leakage and increasing cyberthreats, all of which existing point security offerings are not equipped to handle during the development, deployment and ongoing use of AI apps, Patel said.

Similar to SaaS security solutions that protect the entire cloud environment, AI Defense will give enterprises a common layer of safety and security that protects every user and every application, something that is lacking into today’s AI landscape, Patel said.

“That’s the problem that we wanted to solve with AI Defense: to make sure that anyone who wants to build an application with AI, that we can provide them with the right level of safety and security, visibility, validation and guardrails so that they don’t have to worry about that. They can focus on building the most innovative use cases that can transform their businesses,” he said.

The offering was designed using the “core secret sauce” that Cisco acquired in August from Robust Intelligence, a privately held AI security solutions company, Patel said. AI Defense will be tightly integrated into Cisco's Secure Access security service edge (SSE) Offering, Hypershield, and will be integrated with Cisco Multicloud Defense. Users and partners will be able to access AI Defense from one platform, Cisco Security Cloud, rather than add another point security solution to enterprises’ plates, he said.

“We will be able to use each of those enforcement points for AI Defense,” Patel added.

It’s part of what makes AI Defense unique. It’s not just another AI feature, and it also absolves the end customer and partner from having to add yet another security tool into their environment that’s not integrated with anything else, he said.

“What we’re doing with AI Defense is not being done by any company right now,” Patel said.

AI Defense Features

Cisco's 2024 AI Readiness Index found that only 29 percent of survey respondents feel fully equipped to detect and prevent unauthorized tampering with AI. It’s a big gap that’s holding the industry back from fully experiencing the benefits of AI, Patel said.

It’s also a big area of opportunity for solution providers, especially those that are creating more practices around AI and AI resilience, he said.

AI Defense will help on two fronts: developing and deploying secure AI apps and securing ongoing access to AI apps. The offering will ensure the security and safety guardrails during the development and deployment of AI apps, discovery of all AI apps, including those sanctioned by the company and “shadow” AI apps, model validation and red teaming, and continuous security validation against potential threats or data leakage, the company said.

AI Defense will pull and learn from security data from Cisco Talos threat intelligence, Splunk, and the Robust Intelligence team that is doing threat research for Cisco post-acquisition.

“All of those pieces getting fed into our model for AI defense, that’s another huge advantage of the platform. We’ve got so much data that’s being fed into the platform … security, eventually, is a data game,” Patel said.

Cisco AI Defense will be generally available in March, according to the company.