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\nWith end-to-end security across AI actions, Cisco is helping organizations confidently deploy AI agents at scale<\/p>\n
Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced significant security innovations designed for the agentic AI ecosystem, where software no longer just answers questions\u2014it acts. At RSA Conference 2026, Cisco is introducing solutions to address AI security issues and remove a top barrier to agent adoption. By establishing trusted identities, enforcing strict Zero Trust Access controls, hardening agents before deployment, enforcing guardrails at runtime, and giving security operations center (SOC) teams the tools to stop threats at machine speed, Cisco is building security into the foundation of the emerging AI economy.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI agents aren’t just making existing work faster; they’re a new workforce of co-workers that dramatically expand what organizations can accomplish,\u201d said Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco. \u201cProjects shelved for lack of resources are now within reach. The only limit is imagination, and security teams are the key to unlocking this opportunity by making the agentic workforce safe enough to trust.”<\/p>\n
In a recent Cisco survey of major enterprise customers, 85% reported experimenting with AI agents, but just 5% had moved agentic technology into production.<\/p>\n
To unleash the vast potential of AI agents, Cisco is addressing three key pillars to securing the agentic workforce. First: Protecting the world from agents, ensuring they can only act as intended. Second: Protecting agents from the world, ensuring they can’t be manipulated or corrupted. Third: Detecting and responding to AI incidents at machine speed and scale.<\/p>\n
Protect the world from agents: Establish trust before agents go to work<\/p>\n
Like new employees, AI agents need onboarding to establish their identity, understand their function, and map them to an accountable human manager. Yet today, most enterprises are unaware of which agents are running, let alone who is responsible if something goes wrong. Existing SSE tools weren’t built to enforce time-bound access for agentic workload identities, nor can they understand context behind agent requests.<\/p>\n
According to the 2025 Cisco Talos Year in Review released attackers overwhelmingly targeted a subset of components that directly authenticate users, enforce access decisions, or broker trust between systems. Adversaries\u2019 focus on identity will only accelerate with the rise of agentic workloads.<\/p>\n
To address these challenges, Cisco is extending Zero Trust Access to AI agents, holding them accountable to a human employee and securing agentic actions. New Duo IAM capabilities integrate with novel MCP policy enforcement and intent-aware monitoring in Cisco Secure Access to enforce strict access control, uniquely helping organizations gain full visibility and governance over their agentic workforce. These capabilities include:<\/p>\n
\u2022 Agent Identity Management: Customers can register agents in Duo IAM and map them to accountable human owners, ensuring every agent has a verified identity and enabling traceability of actions.
\n\u2022 Agent and Tool Visibility: Cisco Identity Intelligence discovers agentic and non-human identities to help organizations understand existing AI usage.
\n\u2022 Strict Access Control: Agents are assigned fine-grained permissions only for the specific tasks they perform or resources they need for a short duration, with all tool traffic routed through an MCP gateway to eliminate blind spots.
\nProtect agents from the world: AI Defense safeguards the agentic workforce<\/p>\n
As businesses race to deploy AI agents across increasingly complex and distributed environments, Cisco is expanding AI Defense with powerful new tools that help organizations test, trust, and secure their AI agents and the interactions between them.<\/p>\n
To empower more organizations to meet this challenge head-on, Cisco is democratizing the industry-leading capabilities of AI Defense by launching Cisco AI Defense: Explorer Edition. This new self-service solution is built on the same core AI Defense Validation engine trusted by Global 2000 customers. After signing up, users can begin red teaming the AI models and applications that will be deployed into agentic workflows to uncover susceptibility to attacks and measure risk posture before deployment. This toolkit enables AI developers, AppSec teams, and security researchers to build and secure AI agents.<\/p>\n
Together, these capabilities let organizations move from pilot to production with confidence: knowing their agents have been tested, benchmarked, and hardened before they ever touch a production system.<\/p>\n
Building on the release of its first open source foundation AI model, Cisco is today introducing DefenseClaw \u2014 a secure agent framework designed to eliminate friction between development and security. By integrating a suite of essential open source tools \u2014 including Skills Scanner, MCP Scanner, AI BoM, and CodeGuard \u2014 DefenseClaw helps ensure that every skill is scanned and sandboxed, every MCP server is verified, and every AI asset is automatically inventoried, enabling developers to deploy secure agents with greater speed and confidence.<\/p>\n
Detect and respond at machine speed: Empowering the agentic SOC<\/p>\n
The same AI agents posing new security challenges can also be the most powerful tool in a defender\u2019s arsenal. Today\u2019s SOC analysts are overwhelmed by alert fatigue and fragmented data, spending more time on research than response<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With end-to-end security across AI actions, Cisco is helping organizations confidently deploy AI agents at scale Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced significant security innovations designed for the agentic AI ecosystem, where software no longer just answers questions\u2014it acts. At RSA Conference 2026, Cisco is introducing solutions to address AI security issues and remove a top barrier …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":130930,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[439],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english-news"],"yoast_head":"\n