#572: How Cisco Protects AI Agents in Modern Data Centers

0:00environments are changing dramatically yep so is one Cisco a vision or is it a platform or what is it actually really starting to deliver AI and agentic operations yeah to automate to orchestrate and to give visibility everyone David Bumble back with a very special guest Dave welcome to the show thanks for having me David it's great to be here today give us a bit of background before we jump into the topic that we're going to be discussing today we've got one Cisco but we're going to go to junior year just a little bit about your background well been a Cisco for 25 years so maybe a little older on the outside earlier in career in the in the inside I've done many roles started as an s she went to account management then went to overall management was CTO for Cisco for a while then went to the dark side and began to run some of the business areas and today I'm I'm our lead for all of our specialist teams around the globe really focused on our technology specializations around data center network AI cyber security network modernization all of the things that are

1:04probably top of mind right now so glad you mentioned that right because you mentioned a whole bunch of stuff they Cisco being acquiring company like Splunk so I think a criticism I've heard about Cisco right it's a big company there's so many parts to it it's perhaps disjointed what's your take on it well I think it's it's fair feedback but over the last few years we've really becoming a platform company yeah and focused on bringing things together so that we can deliver value to our customers by the combination of all the things that we can do at Cisco like we don't just talk networking anymore we talk secure networking because we're fusing security with the network when I'll talk to this data center we're talking you know secure data center micro segmentation firewalling all the application visibility and observability that's needed in the data center we're fusing those things together and then making sure that we are delivering sort of the value that the customers would expect from Cisco so the power of Cisco is yes we have this

2:06breath the portfolio but it's bringing it together in a way that helps our customers be successful so there's a lot that's gone on at Cisco over the last few years and I think our customers today are really pleased with what they're seeing in hearing there's a lot of energy this year there's a lot of energy this year and there's a lot of energy around a lot of different things a lot of energy around AI yeah given how AI is clearly exploding on the market customers trying to figure out their use cases and what they do with AI also determining if they're going to make an investment how they make an investment where they make an investment do they build infrastructure do they outsource the infrastructure who's going to do the work what are the use cases how do I drive productivity and then a lot of discussion around how they protect themselves from AI and protect themselves and their data and delivering privacy sovereignty all of those things are top of mine right now for our customers you mentioned security quite a few times and we've only just started

3:11so I'm going to hit you on that because a lot of people watching into sob security so perhaps you can go into that a bit more detail well security is foundational to everything that we do yeah and the way that we discuss security today is you know we do a lot of things around being a pure play security player in the market I know you've had folks on the on the show to talk about that what we're doing around hybrid mesh firewall or zero trust access or identity but for me it's about fusing all of those capabilities with the thing that people know us for the most which is networking and and data center capabilities or chorus speak capabilities really doing the things to give our customers early detection and response capabilities and the network and the infrastructure and then taking it and combining it together and that's really what once Cisco is all about David really taking our capabilities fusing it together and helping deliver I think what customers would

4:16expect from us so is once us go a vision or is it a platform well what is it actually what once Cisco is is our integration across many different elements to deliver for our customers the outcomes they want to see for example we're focused on once Cisco on AI ready data centers and when I say AI ready data centers what Cisco is doing is delivering the full stack yeah it's compute it's networking it's storage it's the automation and the ecosystem that comes to play it's our partnership with Nvidia taking Nvidia Spectrum X software and embedding it in things like NV link which allows GPUs to talk to one another what we're doing with their super nick technologies and bluefield 300 to make sure that we can do scale out capabilities so really building all of that and then taking it to the next level because many customers may be bespoke where they want to sort of build their own

5:17but they want to use peace parts okay or they they want it to be automated and easy to implement capabilities like a hyper fabric yep which is sort of the Moroccan experience for delivering AI infrastructure and helping customers deliver the capabilities they want to see around AI so that you know we're building all of those capabilities because our customers need to see that but we're wrapping security around all of that because we know we know that customer is one they need guard rails they need to protect themselves they need visibility what's what AI applications are people using what type of information are being uploaded because we know you upload data into a public large language model say goodbye to that data so putting the guard rails the mechanisms in place understanding the type of models that are being used and making sure that you're protecting and then using our capabilities that we have with Splunk now to provide visibility and

6:20insights to determine where there could be anomalies and then do the deep forensic analysis and protect yourself as you're driving towards AI so that's a key component so that's a lot of different things being brought together think about it it's compute networking and it's not just our networking with Silicon one because I know you had Martin on the show but it's also bringing in you know Spectrum X from Nvidia so running their Silicon as well on our Nexus platform doing all of that stuff creating partnerships with companies like vast to allow customers to be able to take unstructured data and AI and be able to store it bringing automation capabilities that we have across Cisco into this taking AI defense secure access Splunk and putting it all together for customers so they don't need to do it themselves they know they have predefined reference architectures

7:21that they can go deployed so areas like that areas like the workplace which is changing dramatically people are working from everywhere they're working from home they're working remotely in you know Starbucks they're working from this facility right now at this event and then they're working from the enterprise where they go or they're working from a branch offices that's remote from a headquarters building everything in to allow that to be a modern sophisticated AI agentech run operation so that you can bring together things like switching routing Wi-Fi collaboration visibility tools observability across all of that so bringing it together in in a one Cisco approach so that you really can change the workplace and oh by the way do that in a way so that if you're working from home it can also integrate into this environment you have the right security mechanisms because you're driving zero trust and you need access into specific

8:24workloads doing all of that and putting that together I think the workplace of tomorrow has got to be a modern sophisticated we want to recruit the best talent in the world nobody wants to come to the workplace to work in a cubicle when they can go do that from home and so you've got to create environments where people come together collaborate build out the scrum teams that they need to do development or other work and so really defining what that future workplace looks like and then digital resilience is utopia we know that you know with us acquiring Splunk and now really beginning to integrate Splunk into all the services Splunk is truly the machine data fabric of the AI era I mean it is incredible when you think about what it can do with machine data and everything we talk about in AI happens to be machine data yeah and so being able to look across in an enterprise and determine where you want to do a deep forensic analysis and look at efficacy of

9:26this of a specific environment there's there's there's no solution better on this planet than Splunk and then when we talk about doing that in a place like a Mia right now that is very word around sovereign and hybrid and what they need to do on prem air gap tethered or cloud that environment suits us really well and having the solutions and the capabilities to work across all of that so so that's what we're doing with one Cisco and I would say the foundation of all of this is secure networking because environments are changing dramatically you know you people are bringing lots of devices they're working from lots of different places there are a lot of things across the network running agents running agents agents are unpredictable and so a workforce of today looks like a thousand people tomorrow it can look like 80,000 people because all of these agents are working 24 seven on the network they need identities you need to

10:31be identify them figure out who they're talking to where traffic is flowing and you need deep visibility so for us you need to be able to do this but you need to be able to do this at machine speed yeah the days of doing it at human speed or over like you've got to be able to move as fast as the agents and the bots and the and the robot that tomorrow in tax service and for the technical robots right sorry going yeah so fusing all of this together as the foundation to give you visibility to allow you to do segmentation campus branch and when to do things like sassy on the white area network for all of your branches in the data center to do micro segmentation to get visibility to push security is deep into the infrastructure as possible so you have control everywhere and then put in place compensating controls yeah bad things are going to happen bad things happen and you can't do anything about it right right wrong but when bad things happen you

11:35want the mechanisms in place to isolate it to contain it to respond to remediate and make sure that you recover appropriately so that's what one Cisco is about so we're bringing all of this together so that we can really satisfy what we think are the big problems that customers are dealing with and the capabilities that they need to either do in their own environment or do for their customers or their partners does it just apply to data centers or does it apply in all environments it applies everywhere I don't care if it's working from home if it's a branch if it's the campus if it's the data center if it's the hybrid cloud environment if it's the cloud environment it works everywhere and so for us we want to give customers toys and options so if if some of your workloads need to be on-prem because you need to protect your data and data sovereign keys were critical if some of those non-critical things need to run in the cloud you know you're working in a hybrid fashion and so in that environment I think that's where

12:37our greatest strengths lie and how do you manage all of this because I mean there's a lot of complexity yeah so we have lots of different ways to manage it but what we are doing and I think what we talked a lot about is really starting to deliver AI and agentic operations to automate to orchestrate and to give visibility things that are are being introduced are capabilities like AI Canvas which we'll we'll see in Miraki shortly and and soon you know working in Splunk you know doing agentic ops across the enterprise and the campus branch and when and when I say that what I mean is using AI to really streamline how you operate how you make sure that you get predictive analytics give you visibility so you know where you need to where you may have potential issues how you respond you know and as a human I want to be able to push the button if I need to make changes all of those capabilities so we're we're pushing very hard into this so that our customers can manage can orchestrate get visibility and get insights into what's going on across their

13:41enterprise not just the campus or the branch of the win but it's everything so I've heard G2 mention this in over a number of years right this one platform one Cisco has been announced or has been talked about for a while so it's been a journey right it has been a journey and I am super proud of the work that G2 and his development leaders have accomplished I mean it's incredible work but now it's really about execution yeah so we we have a path we know where we want to go we're beginning all the work to get this integration done right now we just need to continue to execute execute ruthlessly and deliver the outcomes our customers would expect from Cisco Dave I'm getting chased unfortunately I wish I could keep you for longer thanks so much for sharing I really appreciate it thank you so much it's great to be in there Dave