It goes without saying that the game-changer in security these days is generative artificial intelligence.

Meanwhile, supercloud is starting to bring forward a revolution when it comes to the connective tissue between clouds — while new apps emerge and independent software vendors turn into platforms.

Right in the front row of all of that is Cisco Systems Inc., which has been watching big trends emerge in the industry, according to Jeetu Patel (pictured, left), executive vice president and general manager of the Security and Collaboration Business Units at Cisco.

“The attack surface is increasing — there’s much, much more sophisticated caliber of attackers that are now actually participating in this ecosystem,” Patel said. “You simply can’t handle security at human scale. You have to handle it at machine scale. So we’ve been investing in AI very heavily for a fair amount of time.”

Patel, along with Tom Gillis (right), senior vice president and general manager of security at Cisco, spoke with industry analyst John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, at the Supercloud 3: Security, AI and the Supercloud event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE. They discussed Cisco’s new announcements around generative AI and how AI is upping the game of both cyberattackers and cyberdefenders.

The possibilities of generative AI

Even if one were to think about the predictive side, there’s a fair amount that can be done to dig deep and try to detect breaches, according to Patel. That’s especially so in a world that becomes end-to-end encrypted and as more and more workloads are moving to the public cloud.

“You need to make sure that you have some way of being able to detect whether or not there’s malware in a packet without doing deep packet inspection,” Patel said. “We’ve been doing that stuff for a while. We call it our Encrypted Visibility Engine. It’s on our firewall. You can go out and infer, just from the movement of the packet, whether or not there’s malware, and then be able to do something about it.”

Moving into generative AI, the possibilities become pretty exciting, but so do the risks, according to Patel. That’s because when it comes to all the tools and technologies that cyberdefenders have access to, so do the adversaries.

“On one end, we have to make sure that we can use generative AI in some really productive ways to enhance efficiency, to increase the efficacy and then make sure that the experience is way better for the end user. We’re doing a lot of that,” Patel said. “We announced at Cisco Live that we have [two] major announcements we made around generative AI.”

Those announcements were the generative AI-based policy engine called Policy Assistant, as well as its SOC Assistant.

Supercloud is coming fast

Beyond the hype and the noise, practical things are happening, such as the recent announcements from Cisco. But with supercloud and multicloud coming fast, what should enterprises be focused on? One thing to keep in mind is the power of these models, according to Gillis.

“When you mess with ChatGPT, it is a computer that can seem like it’s reasoning with you, right? It can answer back in a cogent way. The algorithms are really, really powerful,” he said. “The other thing that makes it magic is the data that you trained it with. For enterprise customers, in general, you should be thinking about what repositories of data do we have that are text-based that were never useful before but all of a sudden are.”

Cisco’s SOC Assistant is one of the areas the company feels is very promising, according to Gillis. Cisco has been in the incident response business for decades, and every time there’s a security incident, it writes up what happened and what the response was.

“There’s stacks of these write-ups that we can now feed through these large language models and start to create a very powerful assistant,” Gillis said. “That creates that order of magnitude efficiency that we’re talking about … how do I respond to an incident in an automated fashion.”

If one used to think about how applications used to be built, there was a data store, the app layer, and then the presentation layer. They all lived in one place for performance and latency reasons, according to Gillis. In the supercloud era, that’s changed.

“The knowledge engine, the large language models, these things are so big and so powerful that they’re going to be somewhere else,” he said. “The network now becomes like kind of the glue that holds us together, but it’s the logical place to do the enforcement and the monitoring that we’re talking about. It’s more important than ever.”

Here’s the complete video interview with Jeetu Patel and Tom Gillis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Supercloud 3: Security, AI and the Supercloud event:

Photo: SiliconANGLE