Cisco Systems Inc. today unveiled Hypershield, a new security framework to bolster data centers and cloud infrastructure in light of the challenges posed by artificial intelligence.

The new Cisco Hypsershield is designed to protect applications, devices and data across various environments, including public and private data centers, clouds and physical locations. The service includes AI integration to allow for more advanced security outcomes than previously possible through human efforts alone.

Hypershield uses technology initially developed for hyperscale public clouds that has now been adapted for enterprise information technology of all sizes. The service is more of a security fabric than a barrier, allowing security measures to be implemented across every application service, Kubernetes cluster, container, virtual machine and network port to enhance security in diverse environments ranging from data centers to even hospital rooms.

“AI has the potential to empower the world’s 8 billion people to have the same impact as 80 billion,” said Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and general for security and collaboration at Cisco. “With this abundance, we must reimagine the role of the data center – how data centers are connected, secured, operated and scaled.”

The power of Cisco Hypershield, he added, is that it can “put security anywhere you need it – in software, in a server, or in the future even in a network switch. When you have a distributed system that could include hundreds of thousands of enforcement points, simplified management is mission critical.”

Security enforcement with Hypershield is delivered in three different layers: software, virtual machines, and network and compute servers and appliances. All three leverage the same hardware accelerators that are used extensively in high-performance computing and hyperscale public clouds.

Hypershield was also built on three key pillars. For one, it’s AI-native, having been built and designed from the start to be autonomous and predictive. It’s also cloud-native, built on open source eBPF. And it’s hyper-distributed, with the embedding of security controls into servers and the network fabric. Hypershield spans all clouds and leverages hardware acceleration, including data processing units, to analyze and respond to anomalies in application and network behavior.

The new service also addresses three main security challenges. For one, it offers Distributed Exploit Protection, deploying compensating controls to protect against vulnerabilities while reducing the time attackers can exploit new threats.

Autonomous Segmentation helps prevent attackers’ lateral movements within networks by continuously adapting and enforcing network segmentation autonomously. And self-qualifying upgrades streamline the testing and deployment of software upgrades and policy changes with minimal downtime, using a dual data plane that employs a digital twin for pre-deployment testing.

Offered as part of Cisco’s Security Cloud, Hypershield is expected to be generally available in July.

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