Cisco uncorks AI-based security assistant to streamline enterprise protection

Cisco has unveiled its natural language-based AI Assistant for Security aimed at helping enterprise customers better assess security situations, eliminate configuration errors and automate complex tasks.

The Cisco AI Assistant for Security will first be implemented as part of the vendor’s cloud-based Firewall Management Center and Cisco Defense Orchestrator services. Cisco’s Firewall Management Center is a centralized platform for configuring, monitoring, troubleshooting and controlling Cisco Firepower Next-Generation Firewalls. The orchestrator platform lets customers centrally manage, control and automate security policies across multiple cloud-native security systems.

Among the goals of the AI Assistant are to reduce the time it takes for customers to respond to potential threats and simplify the entire security process.

“Using natural language, an administrator can iterate with the AI Assistant to do things like discover and identify all the policies that control access to an application, define a new policy or rule for the administrator, and implement the policy,” said Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and general manager of security and collaboration at Cisco, in a blog about the news.

“The AI Assistant can also identify duplicate or misconfigured security policies from amongst thousands of existing policies and make recommendations for resolving them. To me, this is mind-blowing, because this is a level of intelligence that just isn’t possible without AI,” Patel stated.

In addition, Patel said the security assistant will let customers describe and contextualize events across email, the web, endpoints, and the network to tell security operation center analysts exactly what happened, the impact, and best next steps to take to remediate problems and set new policies.