Cisco AI Defense: Comprehensive Security for Enterprise AI Adoption

Today, we are witnessing artificial intelligence radically reshape the way we do business.

Last year, we published our Cisco AI Readiness Index, which provided critical insights into the state of enterprise AI adoption. In both our survey results and my own conversations with business leaders, a common trend was evident. Despite growing pressures to harness this transformational technology, AI readiness seems to be declining. There are several factors behind this but concerns around safety and security are among the most prominent.

AI’s rapid evolution has introduced risks that traditional cybersecurity solutions aren’t built to address. These risks can include unintended behaviors, data privacy breaches, algorithmic bias, and potential misuse of AI systems, potentially leading to reputational, financial, and legal consequences for businesses.

I’m proud to announce Cisco AI Defense, the first truly comprehensive solution for enterprise AI security. Building on Cisco’s decades of leadership in networking and security, AI Defense delivers unmatched visibility and protection for developing, deploying, and using AI across the business.
At a high level, the risk of enterprise AI is two-fold. There are practical concerns about sensitive data exposure from employees sharing intellectual property, PII, and other confidential information with unsanctioned third-party AI tools. At the same time, businesses developing and deploying their own AI applications need to address a variety of vulnerabilities to ensure these systems are safe and secure for customers.

Cisco AI Defense is a single, end-to-end solution that helps your organization understand and mitigate risk on both the user and application levels. To accomplish this, it comprises four main components: AI Access, AI Cloud Visibility, AI Model & Application Validation, and AI Runtime Protection.

Let’s look a little closer at exactly how AI Defense accomplishes this.

Manage the use of third-party shadow AI

In addition to the wealth of new AI tools that have appeared over the last few years, virtually every existing application provider has tried to add AI capabilities to their products. It won’t be long before every application is an AI application.

To employees, these tools promise greater productivity levels in only a fraction of the time. However, to security teams, they introduce an entirely new and difficult-to-manage massive risk surface.
Cisco AI Defense gives security teams comprehensive visibility and control over the rapidly growing threat of shadow AI.

AI-enabled applications are automatically discovered and assessed to provide important context around usage and risk severity. With these insights, security teams can enforce granular policies that prevent sharing sensitive data and limit access to unsanctioned AI applications across the organization.

Develop and deploy secure AI applications

We are moving from a world that is multi-cloud to one that is multi-cloud and multi-model. As the attack surface grows, so does the potential impact of any attack. Enterprise AI readiness requires an entirely new set of safety and security measures because risk exists at every point in the AI lifecycle.

Let’s picture two scenarios.

In the first, an AI developer fine-tunes a reputable open-source model to create an AI education assistant. This inadvertently weakens built-in guardrails, and the application begins sharing harmful content with students.

In another case, an AI developer trains their application on public data, some of which contains discreet instructions that distribute a phishing link to thousands of end users. The business providing the AI application is ultimately responsible for the impact of the breach.

Cisco AI Defense is designed specifically for the safety and security challenges of this new multi-cloud, multi-model world. It enables teams to identify, assess, and protect AI assets across distributed cloud environments with algorithmic vulnerability testing and hundreds of runtime protection categories.

Until today, security concerns have blocked the wide-scale development and deployment of enterprise AI applications — and understandably so. Cisco AI Defense addresses AI risk from beginning to end, giving business and security leaders the confidence to bring AI applications to market.

A safer future for artificial intelligence with Cisco

Businesses have only just scratched the surface of enterprise applications for AI. With Cisco AI Defense, we created a solution designed for the new safety and security challenges of a multi-cloud, multi-model world.

Our underlying objective? Remove this massive barrier to adoption and unblock the enterprise AI transformation.

AI Defense builds on the cutting-edge work of Robust Intelligence, an AI security company recently acquired by Cisco. They pioneered several breakthroughs, from supply chain security, algorithmic jailbreaking, and introduced the industry’s first AI Firewall. Combined with world-class detection models powered by Scale AI and integrated telemetry from Cisco Talos, AI Defense offers unmatched protection and delivers unparalleled AI security capabilities.

The solution embeds purpose-built AI security technology into the existing network visibility and enforcement points in the Cisco Security Cloud. By performing AI security at the network level, we empower security teams to provide consistent and reliable protections for enterprise AI applications across any number of clouds and models. This saves developers valuable time and resources which can be spent pushing AI innovation even further.

Our approach takes advantage of Cisco’s proven networking leadership and leverages our extensive mesh for unparalleled control over AI traffic. It’s also a testament to our continued investment and commitment to AI and AI security.

We could not be more excited about this announcement, and we’ll have more to share in March 2025.
For now, you can learn more by visiting the Cisco AI Defense product website.

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