News summary:
Cisco’s end-to-end solutions protect both the development and use of AI applications, so businesses can move forward with their AI initiatives with confidence. AI defense prevents AI tool abuse, data breaches, and increasingly sophisticated threats that cannot be addressed by existing security solutions. This innovative solution leverages Cisco’s unparalleled network visibility and control to stay ahead of evolving AI safety and security concerns.
SAN JOSE, Calif., January 15, 2025 — Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), the security and networking leader, today announced Cisco AI Defense, a pioneering solution to enable and protect AI transformation within the enterprise. announced. As AI technology advances, new safety concerns and security threats are emerging at an unprecedented rate that existing security solutions are not equipped to protect against. Cisco AI Defense is designed to help enterprises develop, deploy, and protect AI applications with confidence.
“Business and technology leaders cannot afford to sacrifice safety for speed when deploying AI. In a competitive and dynamic landscape, speed determines the winner.” Cisco Executive said Jeetu Patel, Vice President and Chief Product Officer. Cisco AI Defense is integrated into the fabric of your network, combining unique capabilities to detect and protect against threats as you develop and access AI applications, without tradeoffs. ”
The chances of something going wrong with AI are incredibly high. According to Cisco’s 2024 AI Readiness Index, only 29% of those surveyed feel well-equipped to detect and prevent AI tampering. As AI applications are multi-model and multi-cloud, security challenges are also new and complex. Vulnerabilities can occur at the model or app level, but the responsibility lies with various owners such as developers, end users, and vendors. As companies move beyond publicly available data and start training models on their own data, the risks only increase.
To enable innovation and adoption of AI, enterprises need a common layer of safety and security that protects all users and all applications. AI Defense enables enterprise AI transformation by addressing two pressing risks:
Developing and deploying secure AI applications: As AI becomes ubiquitous, enterprises will use and develop hundreds, if not thousands, of AI applications. Developers need one set of AI security and safety guardrails that work across all applications. AI Defense helps developers move faster and unlock more value by protecting AI systems from attacks and protecting model behavior across platforms. AI defense features include:
AI Discovery: Security teams need to understand who is building the applications and the training sources they are using. AI Defense detects shadow and authorized AI applications across public and private clouds. Model Validation: Model adjustments can lead to harmful and unexpected results. Automated testing checks your AI models for hundreds of potential safety and security issues. This AI-driven algorithm red team identifies potential vulnerabilities and recommends AI Defense guardrails for use by security teams. Runtime security: Continuous validation continuously prevents potential safety and security threats such as prompt injection, denial of service, and sensitive data leakage.
Securing access to AI applications: As end users rush to adopt AI applications such as summarization tools to improve productivity, security teams need to prevent data leaks and contamination of sensitive data. AI Defense enables security teams to:
Visibility: Provides a comprehensive view of shadow and authorized AI-enabled apps used by employees. Access control: Implement policies to limit employee access to unauthorized AI tools. Data and threat protection: Continuously protect against threats and loss of sensitive data while ensuring compliance.
Unlike safety guardrails built into individual AI models, Cisco provides consistent control for a multi-model world. AI Defense is self-optimizing and leverages Cisco proprietary machine learning models to detect ever-evolving AI safety and security concerns based on threat intelligence data from Cisco Talos. Splunk customers using AI Defense receive rich alerts with additional context from across the ecosystem. AI Defense seamlessly integrates with existing data flows for unparalleled visibility and control and is built into Security Cloud, Cisco’s unified AI-driven cross-domain security platform. Leverage Cisco’s extensive mesh of enforcement points to perform AI security at the network level in an optimized way that only Cisco can deliver. Accuracy and reliability are essential to securing enterprise AI applications, and Cisco has been actively involved in the development of AI security industry standards such as MITER, OWASP, and NIST.
“The introduction of AI exposes businesses to new risks that traditional cybersecurity solutions cannot address,” said Kent Noyes, Global Head of AI and Cyber Innovation at Worldwide Technologies. “Cisco AI Defense represents a significant advancement in AI security, providing complete visibility into an enterprise’s AI assets and protection against evolving threats.”
AI Defense is the latest in Cisco’s series of AI-driven security innovations, including Cisco Hypershield. Cisco AI Defense will be available in March to help enterprises secure their AI transformations. For more information, visit cisco.com/go/ai-defense.
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