Cisco Unleashes AI Assistant for Security

Cisco has unveiled its new Artificial Intelligence (AI) Assistant for Security, which it designed to help customers make informed decisions, augment their tool capabilities and automate complex tasks.

Cisco said this marks a major step in making AI pervasive in the Security Cloud, its unified, AI-driven, cross-domain security platform.

Brian Feeney, Cisco's vice president of global security partner sales, said AI Assistant for Security will help provide better protection to partners' customers by simplifying management for both seasoned administrators and novice users.

Cisco's Brian Feeney

"In addition to analyzing the widest breadth of security telemetry, it allows customers to do more in less time and act quickly when suspicious activity is seen to identify and make changes to policies," he said.

The new Cisco AI Assistant for Security is trained on one of the largest security-focused data sets in the world, which analyzes more than 550 billion security events each day across web, email, endpoints, networks and applications. It can understand event triage, impact and scope, root-cause analysis and policy design. With this data, the AI Assistant aims to close the gap between cybersecurity intent and outcomes.

AI Assistant for Firewall, More

Continuing the rapid pace of innovation, Cisco is introducing:

"The first iteration of the AI Assistant will be for the firewall and will be generally available in Spring of 2024," Feeney said. "This is a great entry for partners and customers looking to utilize the benefits that AI can offer as it comes at no additional cost to customers using our cloud-delivered Firewall Management Center, and will expand into other firewall management tools in the future."

While this is the first launch in terms of AI and security it will not be the last, he said.

"We are injecting generative AI and unifying telemetry across all Cisco Security solutions to create a more effective experience and safeguard our customers' business," Feeney said.

"The ability for AI to reshape our daily lives and professional landscapes is immense,” said Graham Robinson, Data#3’s CTO. “As a longstanding Cisco partner, we're excited about the new Cisco AI Assistant for Security and how this will empower our customers with AI-driven efficiencies. The introduction of the AI Assistant to Cisco Firewall Management Center will help our customers quickly and easily configure policy changes. When combined with the new features in the 7.4.1 software release and the Encrypted Visibility Engine, this offers a truly compelling overall experience."