News Summary:
- Cisco end-to-end solutions protect both the development and use of AI applications, enabling businesses to move forward with confidence in AI initiatives.
- AI defense is equipped to protect the misuse of AI tools, data leaks, and increasingly sophisticated threats, and to handle existing security solutions.
- Innovative solutions leverage Cisco's unparalleled network visibility and control to precede ever-evolving AI safety and security concerns.
San Jose, California, January 15, 2025 – Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), a leader in security and networking, today announced Cisco AI Defense, a pioneering solution that enables and protects AI transformation within the enterprise. As AI technology advances, new safety concerns and security threats are emerging at unprecedented speeds at unprecedented speeds where existing security solutions are not ready to protect. Cisco AI Defense is dedicated to helping businesses develop, deploy and secure AI applications with confidence.
“Business and technology leaders can't afford to sacrifice safety for speed when embracing AI.” Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco. “In a competitive and dynamic landscape, speed determines the winner. Fusing into the fabric of the network, Cisco AI Defense combines its unique ability to detect and protect threats when developing and accessing AI applications without trade-offs.”
The piles that cause problems with AI are very high. According to Cisco's 2024 AI Readiness Index, only 29% of those surveyed feel fully equipped to detect and prevent fraudulent AI tampering. Security challenges are new and complex, with AI applications being multi-model and multi-cloud. Vulnerabilities can occur at the model or app level, but liability lies with various owners, including developers, end users and vendors. When companies move beyond public data and start training their own data models, the risks only grow.
To unlock AI innovation and adoption, businesses need a common layer of security and security that protects all users and all applications. AI defense enables enterprises to convert AI by addressing two emergency risks.
Development and deployment of secure AI applications: When AI becomes ubiquitous, businesses use and develop hundreds, if not thousands of AI applications. Developers have a set of AI security and safety guardrails that work in all applications. AI defense helps developers move faster and unlock greater value by protecting AI systems from attacks across the platform and protecting the behavior of their models. AI defense capabilities include:
- Discovering AI: Security teams need to understand who is building the application and the training sources to use. AI Defense detects shadows and authorizes AI applications across the public and private clouds.
- Model verification: Tuning the model can lead to toxic and unexpected results. Automated testing checks AI models for hundreds of potential safety and security issues. This AI-driven algorithm Red Team identifies potential vulnerabilities and recommends guardrails for AI defenses for use by security teams.
- Runtime Security: Continuous verification protection against potential safety and security threats such as rapid injection, denial of service, and continuous sensitive data leaks.
Protecting access to AI applications: As end users are in a hurry to adopt AI applications such as summarization tools to increase productivity, security teams need to prevent data leakage and addiction to their own data. AI defense allows security teams to:
- Visibility: It provides a comprehensive view of shadows and authorized AI-enabled apps used by employees.
- Access Control: Implement policies that restrict employees' access to unauthorized AI tools.
- Data and Threat Protection: Continuous protection against threats and confidential data loss while ensuring compliance.
Unlike safety guardrails built into individual AI models, Cisco offers consistent control in the multi-model world. AI defense is self-optimization, leveraging Cisco's proprietary machine learning model to detect ever-evolving safety and security concerns of AI based on Cisco Talos threat intelligence data. Splunk customers using AI Defense receive enriched alerts with additional context from across the ecosystem. AI defense seamlessly integrates with existing data flows for unparalleled visibility and control, and is embedded in Security Cloud, Cisco's unified, AI-driven, cross-domain security platform. Take advantage of Cisco's widespread enforcement points to run AI security at the network level in a way that is optimized to be delivered exclusively by Cisco. Accuracy and reliability are essential to protecting enterprise AI applications, and Cisco is actively involved in developing standards for the AI security industry, including those of Miter, OWASP and NIST.
“The adoption of AI exposes businesses to new risks that traditional cybersecurity solutions have not addressed,” said Kent Noyes, global head of AI and cyber innovation at World Wide Technology. “Cisco AI defense represents a significant step forward in AI security, providing full visibility into your enterprise's AI assets and protection against evolving threats.”
AI Defense is the latest in a series of AI-driven security innovations from Cisco, including Cisco Hiverseschair Field. Cisco AI Defense will be available to businesses in March to protect AI conversions. For more information, see cisco.com/go/ai-defense.
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