Cisco Systems Inc. today unveiled Hypershield, a new security framework to bolster data centers and cloud infrastructure in light of the challenges posed by artificial intelligence.
The new Cisco Hypsershield is designed to protect applications,
devices and data across various environments, including public and private data
centres, clouds and physical locations. The service includes AI integration to
allow for more advanced security outcomes than previously possible through
human efforts alone.
Hypershield uses technology initially developed for hyper scale public clouds that have now been adapted for enterprise information technology
of all sizes. The service is more of a security fabric than a barrier, allowing
security measures to be implemented across every application service,
Kubernetes cluster, container, virtual machine and network port to enhance
security in diverse environments ranging from data centres to even hospital
rooms.
“AI has the potential to empower the world’s 8 billion people to
have the same impact as 80 billion,” said Jeetu Patel, executive vice president
and general for security and collaboration at Cisco. “With this abundance, we
must reimagine the role of the data centre – how data centres are connected,
secured, operated and scaled.”
The power of Cisco Hypershield, he added, is that it can “put
security anywhere you need it – in software, in a server, or in the future even
in a network switch. When you have a distributed system that could include
hundreds of thousands of enforcement points, simplified management is mission
critical.”
Security enforcement with Hypershield is delivered in three
different layers: software, virtual machines, and network and compute servers
and appliances. All three leverage the same hardware accelerators that are used
extensively in high-performance computing and hyperscale public clouds.
Hypershield was also built on three key pillars. For one, it’s
AI-native, having been built and designed from the start to be autonomous and
predictive. It’s also cloud-native, built on open-source eBPF. And it’s
hyper-distributed, with the embedding of security controls into servers and the
network fabric. Hypershield spans all clouds and leverages hardware
acceleration, including data processing units, to analyze and respond to
anomalies in application and network behaviour.
The new service also addresses three main security challenges. For
one, it offers Distributed Exploit Protection, deploying compensating controls
to protect against vulnerabilities while reducing the time attackers can
exploit new threats.
Autonomous Segmentation helps prevent attackers’ lateral movements
within networks by continuously adapting and enforcing network segmentation
autonomously. And self-qualifying upgrades streamline the testing and deployment
of software upgrades and policy changes with minimal downtime, using a dual
data plane that employs a digital twin for pre-deployment testing.
https://siliconangle.com/2024/04/18/cisco-unveils-hypershield-enhance-security