Cisco goes all out on AI

During the Cisco Live conference in Las Vegas last week, Cisco announced it was “reimagining the way people work with new, powerful generative AI technology”. Cisco said it would harness large language models (LLMs) – the power behind ChatGPT, Google Bard and Bing AI – across its collaboration and security portfolios “to help organisations drive productivity and simplicity for their workforce”.

Expectations are at an all-time high. Organisations are grappling with how to deliver unrivalled experiences for hybrid workers, while safeguarding their businesses from sophisticated cyber threats.

According to Cisco’s 2023 State of Global Innovation study, IT professionals rank generative AI as the technology most likely to have a significant impact on their business, with 85% of those saying they’re prepared for its impact. Cisco says it recognises the important role generative AI will play in advancing the future of work and is committed to providing hybrid workers with an efficient, safer, and more productive, work experience.

“Generative AI will quickly become pervasive as we see businesses and workers embrace the technology to become materially more productive,” said Jeetu Patel, Cisco executive vice president and general manager for security and collaboration. “At Cisco, we’ve been using AI for years. Now we’re unveiling how we’re incorporating generative AI into our existing products, helping customers drive real value to unlock the most secure, unrivalled work experiences possible.”

Cisco provided the following information on how it would integrate generative AI:

With every work interaction being hybrid, employees, and customers need collaboration experiences that empower them to do their best work. Within the Webex Suite, new summarisation capabilities that help people get up to speed in seconds will include:

New conversation summaries in Webex Contact Center will provide agents with a fast, automated way to consume long-form text from digital chats with customers as well as facilitating post-call wrap-up and resolution with customers. For example, if a customer escalates to a call with a human agent, they expect that agent to be informed and not have to repeat their frustrations. Chat summaries provide the agent with a clear summarisation of issues and resolutions already explored via self-service and a summary of the call to both the agent and customer once it ends.

Cisco is investing in cutting-edge innovations in artificial intelligence and machine learning that will augment security staff by simplifying operations and increasing efficacy. Further delivering on its Security Cloud vision, Cisco is previewing new generative AI capabilities to simplify policy management and improve threat response.

Effective security policy creation and management is an oftentimes extremely complex but critical function of cybersecurity hygiene. There is little room for error and the process of making simple edits that won’t interfere with or override previous rules is extremely time consuming and technically challenging. The volume, inconsistency, and complexity of maintaining all of these policies across all of these systems creates a significant risk that opens the door for attacks.

The Cisco Security Cloud will leverage a generative AI Policy Assistant to address this problem by enabling security and IT administrators to describe granular security policies and evaluate how to best implement them across different aspects of their security infrastructure.

The Cisco Policy Assistant can reason with the existing firewall policy set to implement and simplify rules within the Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center. It is the first of many examples of how generative AI can reimagine policy management across the Cisco Security Cloud.

Threat detection and response is another complex and high stakes responsibility of the security operations where time is of the essence and analysts must rapidly gain understanding of complex systems at machine scale.

Cisco’s security operations center (SOC) Assistant will augment security analysts with the context to make the right decisions at the right time. The SOC Assistant will provide a comprehensive situation analysis for analysts, correlating intel across the Cisco Security Cloud platform solutions, relaying potential impacts, and providing recommended actions. Significantly reducing the time needed for SOC teams to respond to potential threats.

For years, Cisco has leveraged AI with audio, video, natural language understanding, and analytics to create unrivaled experiences for Webex users. New enhancements in LLM and generative AI are advancing further to deliver unrivaled hybrid work experiences. Webex has established a first set of principles, consisting of multi-modal support, permissions, privacy, and accuracy for its enterprise-grade AI. This includes only using data that individuals already have permission to access, based on the privacy and security rules of that specific data source.

Cisco: How World Possible Is Using Technology To Inclusively Bridge the Digital Divide To Help Teachers and Students

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / June 2, 2023 / Cisco Systems Inc.

Cisco Systems Inc., Friday, June 2, 2023, Press release picture

The Transformational Tech series highlights Cisco's grant recipients that use technology to help transform the lives of individuals and communities.

An estimated 37% of the world's population - or 2.9 billion people - have still never used the internet and are missing out on the wealth of learning opportunities available online.

In addition, when reflecting on the past three years, the effects from pandemic school closures remain and have had a lasting impact on teacher wellbeing, and student learning proficiency levels globally. This situation was particularly true in communities without reliable access to the internet or technologies to aid teachers and families with remote instruction. More is needed to help this population of learners accelerate learning to meet minimum learning proficiency levels country by country. And more needs to be done to inclusively connect these communities and their students to trained teachers and quality classroom resources.

World Possible is a Cisco nonprofit partner who bridges these gaps and connects offline learners to the world's knowledge with an educational server called RACHEL (Remote Area Community Hotspot for Education and Learning). RACHEL is an innovative learning tool for teachers to engage their students and bridge the digital divide and help scale teacher productivity while working with diverse classrooms.

In appreciation of educators everywhere, we want to shine a light on World Possible technology being used by teachers and students in Oceania, Asia and Latin America. In these examples, RACHEL is used to build teacher capacity, increase student engagement, and improve overall classroom performance while helping students living in remote and disconnected communities build digital skills.

Oceania - Kiribati:

Kiribati is an island country composed of over 30 atolls with over 17,500 students attending 110 schools. These students and their teachers are spread over 3.5 million square kilometers in the central Pacific Ocean. With such a dispersed and distributed population, education officials address the challenge of providing access to trained teachers with current curriculum in programs like the Kiribati Education Improvement Program.

Story continues

Kiribati Education officials use RACHEL server devices to store digital media within key training schools. These servers have the flexibility to be solar powered with battery backup support to reach even the most remote areas of this island country. With the high cost of internet, which is primarily only available through mobile phone data plans, access to these resources at scale isn't sustainable for these communities. But a RACHEL content device changes this dynamic, making professional training and receiving updated content easier.

Asia - Cambodia:

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies and is committed to connecting all the world's people. Through their work, ITU Data Hub reports indicate that 60% of individuals in Cambodia are using the internet compared with the world average of 66%. This gap in access to the internet within Cambodia increases in rural and remote populations. World Possible serves as a bridge for this digital divide for teachers and students in rural Cambodia.

At Doris Dillon School, the World Possible RACHEL server is used directly by students in classrooms to learn English, improve numeracy skills and build digital skills using computers. The RACHEL device also acts as a community digital library, used by families for gardening, health education and computer classes.

Latin America - Guatemala

Within Latin America, access to the internet and technology for use in schools can be challenging. In Guatemala, the same ITU Data Hub reports indicate that 51% of individuals in the country are using the internet compared with the world average of 66%. With a beautiful and rugged landscape, Guatemala has high mountain ranges dotted with volcanos, jungle regions and large urban cities such as Guatemala City or Quetzaltenango in the northern highlands. Within this diverse geography is a school using RACHEL located in Sacsiguán Monte Mercedes, a small village from Sololá, in the western highlands of Guatemala. In this remote and rural area, Elvia Patricia Julajuj Cuxulic, who is an accountant by profession, teaches in the Monte Mercedes Secondary School leads seven classes of students every week in the afternoons serving 87 students from grades 7 to 9.

Earlier this year her school received a RACHEL server that is now being used by students who previously had little access to the internet. As a teacher, Elvia has been actively using the device with her students and reports to the Ministry of Education show over 130,000 logged events, and 66,900 pages visited. As one of four teachers in Monte Mercedes Secondary School, she hopes that her students and her community will all have the chance of having a better life through education.

More to come

Cisco inclusively invests using a portfolio approach in nonprofits to further STEM Education student outcomes, inspire youth to regenerate our climate and develop trained teacher capacity globally. Through investment partners like World Possible we aim to strengthen human capital, inclusively connect people to resources and services with quality platforms informed by education proven practice.

This fall, World Possible will release an upgraded RACHEL server with increased capacity for concurrent device connections, improved device storage, and will leverage a new processor. Through a new server, coupled with the cloud update service called DataPost, education officials can use Android devices to update RACHEL servers in remote locations around the world. To learn more about RACHEL visit WorldPossible.org.

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Cisco jumps into SSE arena, boosts application security

Cisco this week took the wraps off a security service edge (SSE) offering that aims to help enterprises securely connect growing edge resources, including cloud, private and SAAS applications.

Along with the SSE package, the vendor made two additional application security-related announcements at its Cisco Live! customer event. It unveiled Cisco Multicloud Defense, which is a new service designed to protect cloud service workloads, and it upgraded Panoptica, its cloud-native security application development software.

The SSE package, called Cisco Secure Access, features zero-trust network access (ZTNA), secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB), firewall as a service (FWaaS), DNS security, remote browser isolation (RBI) and other security capabilities. It’s designed to secure any application via any port or protocol, with optimized performance and continuous verification and granting of trust—all from a single, cloud-managed dashboard, wrote Jeff Scheaffer, vice president of product management for Cisco’s SSE team, in a blog about the SSE offering. 

Gartner describes SSE services as including access control, threat protection, data security, security monitoring, and acceptable-use control enforced by network-based and API-based integration. SSE is primarily delivered as a cloud-based service, and it may include on-premises or agent-based components, the analyst firm says.

Cisco’s SSE platform includes client-based and clientless browser–based access, granular user, and application-based access policy, SAML authentication, intrusion prevention, built-in identity provider, and contextual access control. It authenticates users through a secure, encrypted tunnel, allowing users to see only applications and services they have permission to access, according to Cisco.

“Cisco Secure Access features a new ZTNA Relay architecture that solves the challenges of last generation ZTNA vendors. Last generation ZTNA vendors do not support all application architectures, like multi-channel applications, peer-to-peer applications, or server-initiated communication,” Scheaffer wrote. “Last generation ZTNA vendors often struggle with the sheer volume of 1000’s of enterprise and long-tail legacy applications.”

The Cisco Secure Access ZTNA Relay architecture is based on MASQUE and QUIC protocols and supports all applications, ports, and protocols. “…by combining ZTNA with a fallback VPN-as-a-Service (VPNaaS) in a single secure client with identity and posture checks, Cisco Secure Access transparently delivers the most secure connection possible for all applications,” Scheaffer stated. 

The service also integrates intelligence from Cisco’s Talos security research group to automatically keep the system up to date on the latest threats. Talos processes 600 billion DNS requests per day, 5 billion reputation requests, and 2 million malware samples per day. SSE continuously runs AI, statistical, and machine-learning models against the massive Talos database to provide insight into cyber threats and improve incident response rates, Scheaffer stated.

SSE will also be integrated with Cisco’s ThousandEyes network intelligence software to help organizations pinpoint and resolve network performance issues quickly.

The SSE package is important particularly as users move applications to the cloud and adopt more edge networking architectures, said Neil Anderson, area vice president of cloud & infrastructure solutions at World Wide Technology (WWT), a Cisco partner and technology services provider.

“Cisco has been a little bit slow to be competitive in the SSE market, but we're excited about this new service because it starts with a cloud-first approach and advances API security and workload security in a way customers will find useful,” Anderson said.

The SSE market includes players such as Palo Alto, Zscaler, Netskope and others.

Gartner says by 2025, 70% of organizations that implement agent-based ZTNA will choose either a secure access service edge (SASE) or security service edge (SSE) provider for ZTNA, rather than a stand-alone offering, and by 2026, 45% of organizations will prioritize advanced data security features for inspection of data at rest and in motion as a selection criterion for SSE.

Cisco Secure Access will be in limited availability starting in July and will be generally available in October 2023.

On the cloud security front, Cisco added a new service called Multicloud Defense that will help customer security operations teams manage workload security across AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services.

“Cisco Multicloud Defense brings together distributed Layer-7 protection, web application firewall (WAF), and data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities managed through a single, dynamic policy,” wrote Rick Miles, vice president of product management with Cisco’s cloud and network security group, in a blog.

“It acts as the interpreter across clouds and uses gateways, which are distributed across customer VPCs, as enforcement points for security policies. This enables Multicloud Defense to stop threats that target applications, block command & control, prevent data exfiltration, and mitigate lateral movement,” Miles stated. 

The technology in Multicloud Defense comes primarily from Cisco’s recent acquisition of cloud network security vendor Valtix.

Cisco also enhanced its Panoptica cloud-native application security software. Panoptica lets developers and engineers provide cloud-native security from application development to runtime. It offers a single interface for container, serverless, API, service mesh, and Kubernetes security, it scales across multiple clusters with an agentless architecture, and it integrates with CI/CD tools and language frameworks across multiple clouds.

The idea is to allow developers to embed security-centric or security-conscious decisions earlier in the software development lifecycle, Cisco stated.

The importance of application security protection is growing with IDC predicting that the application protection and availability market will grow from $2.5 billion in 2021 to $5.7 billion by 2026.

“Applications provide a unique vantage point in the security architecture. Applications enable functionality, and the manner in which users interact with this functionality is a good indicator of abuse and misuse, and ultimately malicious intent. This insight is unique and difficult to glean from other sources of security telemetry such as network firewalls,” IDC wrote in a recent report entitiled “Worldwide Application Protection and Availability Forecast, 2022–2026: Security Powers the Digital Experience.”

“Threat actors have also recognized the importance of web applications to businesses and have devised numerous methods of attacking the applications or underlying infrastructure as part of extortion, harassment, fraud and abuse, or data theft campaigns,” IDC stated.

To Panoptica, Cisco added Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) support, which promises to bring continuous cloud security compliance and monitoring at scale, giving customers visibility into their entire inventory of cloud assets, including Kubernetes clusters. In addition, a new attack path engine that uses graph-based technology to deliver advanced attack path analysis will help security teams quickly identify and remediate potential risks across cloud infrastructures, Cisco stated. 

Panoptica will also be integrated into Cisco’s Full Stack Observability portfolio to provide real-time visibility to prioritize business risks.

Cisco’s Full-Stack Observability initiative features a broad range of Cisco technologies as well as an ecosystem of partners and open-source tools. Cisco’s security portfolio will provide telemetry that can be included in new applications to control security across multiple domains.

The new Panoptica features will be available in the fall of this year.

Cisco also rolled out a new high-end firewall, the Secure Firewall 4200 Series, that it says is twice as fast as previous high-end Cisco firewalls. The 4200 Series firewall runs a new operating system, release 7.4, that uses AI and ML to identify threats in encrypted traffic without decryption.

“This resolves the complexities of decryption for inspection, as well as performance and privacy concerns,” wrote Rick Miles, Cisco vice president of product management for cloud and network security, in a blog about the new firewall. “Further, 7.4 leverages the foundation of the security stack to add secure access capabilities with zero trust application access. This evolution of the ZTNA model goes beyond the ‘authorize then ignore’ mentality by adding inspection of user traffic and application behavior for more secure access.  Additional access from branch offices to applications without expensive leased lines comes with simplified branch routing, allowing the firewall to centrally recognize, monitor, and route application traffic for improved performance and secure access.”

Cisco Secure Firewall 4200 Series appliance will be generally available in September supporting the 7.4 version of operating system. The 7.4 OS will be generally available for the rest of the Secure Firewall appliance family in December 2023.

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