Cisco Systems Inc. is expanding its push into secure-by-default networking with a new initiative announced today.

It’s aimed at eliminating insecure legacy features, hardening device configurations and preparing enterprise infrastructure for emerging threats such as artificial intelligence-powered attacks and post-quantum cryptography. The effort, detailed in a blog post by Anthony Grieco, Cisco’s chief security and trust officer, is focused on positioning infrastructure resilience as a core priority for the company’s product roadmap and customer strategy going forward.

Organizations are facing a wave of evolving risks driven by legacy systems, rapid AI adoption and increasingly complex networks. Grieco argues that many of the threats targeting enterprises are amplified by outdated protocols, misconfigurations and long-standing features that were never designed for modern threat models. Cisco’s new direction is meant to counter structural weaknesses by shifting its platforms toward secure defaults and reducing the need for administrators to manually harden systems.

The initiative involves accelerating the retirement of older, insecure capabilities embedded across the networking ecosystem, including deprecating features that introduce unnecessary risk, tightening baseline configurations and providing clearer guidance to customers on hardware and software that should be phased out.

Cisco believes that relying on optional or bolt-on controls is no longer viable and that infrastructure vendors must take responsibility for establishing safer baseline behavior across their products.

The company is preparing its platforms for future threats, including the impact of quantum computing on encryption and the already seen surge in AI-driven exploitation techniques. As part of its preparations, Cisco is investing in post-quantum cryptography, expanding its hardware root-of-trust capabilities and tightening its supply-chain security posture to ensure long-term resilience.

The resilient-infrastructure push by Cisco will also see it take a stronger stance on the need to modernize infrastructure rather than continually patch around aging systems.

Cisco is rightly concerned that organizations running outdated devices or relying on legacy configurations will face rising operational and security risks, especially as generative AI is seeing attackers automate reconnaissance and exploit developments.

“We know security and trust in technology will look different in 2040, as it did 15 years ago,” said Grieco. “As we evolve the network to be secure today, we must prepare for the future. Actively protect your organization by keeping systems up to date, using secure configurations, and planning for device lifecycle management.”

Cisco’s new push for resilient infrastructure comes after the company also today announced plans to build a quantum internet by the late 2030s in partnership with IBM Corp.

The quantum internet plan involves building a large-scale and fault-tolerant network that will enable tens of thousands of qubits to work together to solve some of the world’s most complex problems.

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