Cisco touts step towards making AI pervasive in Security Cloud platform

Cisco has announced the new Cisco AI Assistant for Security at Cisco Live in Melbourne, talking up its ability to train the assistant using large volumes of data.

The Cisco AI Assistant for Security is designed to understand event triage, impact and scope, root cause analysis and policy design.

It is first going live within the Cisco Cloud-delivered Firewall Management Center and Cisco Defense Orchestrator to address the challenge of setting and maintaining complex policies and firewall rules.

Using Cisco AI Assistant for Firewall Policy, Cisco is aiming for administrators to use natural language to discover policies and get rule recommendations, eliminating duplicate rules, misconfigured policies and complex workflows with increased visibility as well as speed up troubleshooting and configuration tasks.

Cisco is also touting the technology as a way to simplify the task of inspecting encrypted data centre traffic. With the 7.4.1 Operating System, now available across the Cisco Secure Firewall family, customers can use the Encrypted Visibility Engine which uses “billions of samples” including sandboxed malware samples, to determine if the encrypted traffic is transporting malware. It can tell which operating system the traffic is coming its from and what client application is generating it, without the need for decryption.

The vendor is touting its “unmatched visibility across the network and security,” and work “with more machine-driven telemetry and on a scale larger than most in the industry” as an advantage.

The new AI assistant is trained on “one of the largest security-focused data sets in the world,” according to Cisco. It analyses “more than 550 billion security events each day across web, email, endpoints, networks and applications.”

“To be an AI-first company, you must be a data-first company,” stated Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco.

Data#3 lent its support to the announcement. “The introduction of the AI Assistant to Cisco Firewall Management Center will help our customers quickly and easily configure policy changes,” said Graham Robinson, Chief Technology Officer, Data#3. “When combined with the new features in the 7.4.1 software release and the Encrypted Visibility Engine, this offers a truly compelling overall experience."

CRN Australia travelled to Cisco Live 2023 as a guest of Cisco.