Cisco Unleashes AI Defense For EnterprisesCisco Unleashes AI Defense For Enterprises

Cisco has rolled out its new AI Defense solution that aims to protect the development and use of AI apps within enterprises.

AI Defense protects against the AI tool misuse, data leakage and cyber attacks. The solution will be available in March. 

Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s executive vice president and chief product officer, said the goal of AI Defense is to make sure organizations can “innovate fearlessly” without safety and security as the primary concern, “which then actually holds them back for accelerated adoption.”

AI Defense will be available for Cisco’s partners to bring to market.

Cisco's Jeetu Patel

“In the first few months, we're going to be in the learning process because we have to see how organizations are going to consume this because this is all new for everyone right now, “ Patel said. “We'll be learning for the first few months and then we'll scale it out to partners globally as we learn more about how the product is going to get used.”

Cisco AI Defense: Partner Impact

DJ Sampath, Cisco’s vice president of product for AI security, said partners are setting up their AI practices.

Cisco's DJ Sampath

“We've been talking to all of these partners, and they are figuring out ways of being able to serve their customers on how their customers are using AI,” he said. “They're helping them implement it. They're helping them secure it. And this dovetails really nicely with the efforts that they're doing to set up their AI practices. So it's really exciting times when it comes to collaborating and working closely with our partners.”

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The capabilities of AI Defense include:

AI Defense gives security teams visibility, access control, and data and threat protection, according to Cisco.

In the future, every app will be an AI app, Patel said.
“As you have that happen, you need to make sure that defending these applications and making sure that there's a continuous validation that's going on so that they can always stay current is very important ... and it's just very hard to do that by expecting every individual company to do it,” he said. “If you think about the way that the SaaS market evolved, every SaaS company had some level of security capability in what they did. The security industry grew fastest when the SaaS boom was taking off because you also needed security companies to go out and make sure that this new way of working had the right level of security controls. I think the same thing is going to happen in AI. I think there's going to be a need for platform providers that provide some level of AI safety and security. We're excited to see what the market tells us as they use this product more. We've gotten some tremendous feedback from the early access customers so far, and I can't wait to take it out to the market.”

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