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Cisco Systems Inc. today unveiled a broad set of new products and platform updates designed to bring artificial intelligence to the network edge and modernize how enterprises deploy and secure distributed workloads. The announcements, made at Cisco’s annual Partner Summit, include the debut of the Cisco Unified Edge platform, enhancements to its secure enterprise network architecture, and updates to its managed services portfolio for AI and cybersecurity. Cisco said it’s seeking to position itself as the critical infrastructure layer for the AI era, enabling real-time inferencing, agentic AI workloads and distributed automation at scale. “AI is moving faster than their infrastructure can support,” said Tim Coogan, Cisco’s senior vice president of global partner sales. “It is moving in a way that’s making data strategies that were in place 12 or 18 months ago insufficient in today’s environment.” AI at the edge Headlining the announcements is Cisco Unified Edge, a converged hardware platform that combines computing, networking and storage into a modular system purpose-built for real-time AI inferencing at the edge. Targeted at environments like retail, healthcare and manufacturing, Unified Edge is designed to run both traditional and agentic AI workloads close to where data is generated. “We set out to get away from all these cables, multiple management planes and complexity that happens at the edge,” said Jeremy Foster, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Compute. Unified Edge (pictured) comes in a modular 19-inch chassis supporting central processing units and graphics processing units, up to 120 terabytes of storage, redundant power and cooling and integrated 25-gigabit networking. The platform supports edge deployments in wall-mounted or rack-mounted formats and includes embedded security features like tamper-proof bezels, confidential computing and zero-trust access. Confidential computing isolates sensitive workloads and protects with additional added security layers. Cisco also updated its Intersight management platform to handle thousands of edge sites with centralized visibility. The platform is designed to be “the easiest system to operate in x86 edge computing, period,” Foster said. Enhancements to Cisco’s AI-ready secure network architecture include unified cloud management, AI-driven automation tools and new purpose-built devices for enterprise campuses and branches. Cisco said the updates enable simplified network deployment, observability and policy enforcement across hybrid environments. Customers can now access a “global overview” of Catalyst and Meraki networks through a single Meraki dashboard. New cloud-managed fabrics and agentic workflows use natural language prompts and pre-validated designs to automate complex tasks. “We are completing our journey of cloud management across all of our iOS XE switches,” said Aruna Ravichandran, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for AI, networking and collaboration at Cisco. “Every customer, no matter their size, can deploy cloud fabric using the Meraki dashboard.” Cisco iOS, its Internetwork Operating System, is a network OS used on Cisco routers and switches to integrate and manage network functions. The company’s new 8200 and 8400 Series Secure Routers and Wi-Fi 7 access points will be available this quarter, delivering low latency and intelligent traffic handling for high-bandwidth AI workloads. Added security for MSPs With partners in the spotlight at this week’s conference, Cisco introduced several security enhancement aimed at managed service providers. New multi-tenant capabilities within its Security Cloud Control platform allow MSPs to manage Hybrid Mesh Firewall deployments and other security services for multiple customers from a single console. The Hybrid Mesh Firewall combines on-box threat inspection, integrated software-defined wide area networking and AI-based segmentation across data centers, cloud and edge environments. Cisco’s Secure Firewall 200 and 6100 Series support the functionality, and the new Threat Defense 7.7 firewall software can detect and block up to 100% of threats in NetSecOPEN tests, Cisco claimed. “We are baking hybrid mesh firewalling capabilities into the fabric of the network through smart switches,” said Ambika Kapure, senior vice president of product success at Cisco. “We can also manage third-party firewalls and do workload protection via agents like eBPF that allow us to get down to the process level.” Extended Berkeley Packet Filter runs sandboxed programs in the Linux kernel without changing kernel source code or loading a kernel module, thereby preventing tampering. Security Cloud Control now supports granular role-based access control, streamlined licensing, and standardized application programming interfaces for onboarding and provisioning. Cisco says the enhancements enable more profitable growth for security-focused MSPs. In a briefing with journalists, Cisco executives emphasized that their focus is on supporting customers through what they described as the “agentic AI era,” where AI agents carry out complex tasks autonomously. That shift, they said, creates significant demands on bandwidth, power, and computing capacity across highly distributed infrastructures. “Almost every customer we’re talking to is reimagining and rethinking decisions that they’ve made in IT over the last several years,” said Jeff Schultz, Cisco’s senior vice president of portfolio strategy. Cisco’s approach is centered on infrastructure modernization, secure connectivity and digital resilience. To advance that strategy, Cisco is embedding AI observability into its network and security stack, partnering with independent software vendors and integrating telemetry and threat defense data into its Splunk data collection platform. We are making sure that Splunk is embedded in our AI-ready data center offering,” Schultz said. Cisco Unified Edge and the new secure routers, wireless access points and cloud-managed fabric capabilities will be generally available by the end of the year. The updates to Security Cloud Control and managed services are available today. Photo: Cisco
