In a race to dominate the Artificial Intelligence domain, Cisco System, one of the largest software companies, launched its groundbreaking security product called Cisco HyperShield on Thursday, 18th February 2024. With the help of AI, Cisco aims to secure data centers, clouds, and other IT environments.
In a video post of Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s executive vice president and general manager of security and collaboration shared that for the past 40 years, CISCO has been working on this Cyber Security product which aims to solve decade-long challenges such as infrastructure upgrade, patching gaps and segmentation.
The launch of this product comes after Cisco’s recent acquisition of Splunk, for $157 per share in cash, representing approximately $28 billion in equity value. “This acquisition will revolutionize the way our customers leverage data to connect and protect every aspect of their organization as we help power and protect the AI revolution,” says Chuck Robbins, Chair and CEO of Cisco.
With the rapid growth in AI Security threats, Cisco Hypershield will revolutionize security across both on-premises and cloud environments, empowering organizations to protect modern applications more effectively.
Challenges Cisco HyperShield aims to address:
In a detailed blog post by Jeetu Patel, he stated that this brand new architecture was developed to solve the following challenges:
- Segmentation: Segmentation is a security method whereby organizations isolate sensitive IT data from general data. However, Cisco pointed out that it becomes hard to carry out segmentation when applications become hyper-distributed and are continually changing.
- Patching: The time it takes for a vulnerability to be spotted and for patching to be done takes a long time. This creates a window for exploitation by threat actors who have sophisticated attack weapons.
- Upgrade: Upgrading infrastructure is a very tedious process and may often disrupt business operations. People are left using outdated infrastructures which are vulnerable to emerging threats.
How Cisco HyberShield aims to address these challenges:
Cisco HyberShield is built on 3 key features; extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF), hardware acceleration, and AI. Cisco addresses these challenges through
- Autonomous Segmentation: This will improve a system’s performance and security by using an intelligent segmentation model. Cisco Hypershield refines and updates these rules dynamically.
- Distributed Exploit Protection: This serves as a shield/blockage that protects the system from vulnerability exploitation until patching has been carried out.
- Self-qualifying upgrades: The process of testing and upgrading infrastructure can be automated resulting in no downtime or disruption. This ensures robust defense against attacks.
This exciting innovation has raised the standard for many more weapons that cybersecurity professionals can use to battle the ever-rising threat. This AI-integrated technology will serve as a game-changer in the security of cloud infrastructures and data centers.
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