Cisco today announced Cisco Hypershield, a revolutionary new security architecture designed to protect data centres and clouds in the era of AI.

Hypershield enables security enforcement to be placed everywhere it’s needed, from software to servers to network switches, bringing advanced security capabilities to data centres, factory floors, and hospital imaging rooms.

Hypershield is built on three key pillars: AI-native design for autonomous and predictive security, cloud-native technologies like eBPF, and a hyper-distributed approach that embeds security controls into servers and the network fabric. This allows Hypershield to block application exploits in minutes, stop lateral movement, and enable zero-downtime software upgrades.

“Cisco Hypershield is one of the most significant security innovations in our history,” said Chuck Robbins, Cisco Chair and CEO. “With our data advantage and strength in security, infrastructure and observability platforms, Cisco is uniquely positioned to help our customers harness the power of AI.”

Cisco is collaborating with NVIDIA to build AI-native security solutions that protect and scale the data centres of tomorrow. This includes leveraging NVIDIA’s Morpheus cybersecurity AI framework and NIM microservices to augment Hypershield with robust security from cloud to edge.

As AI workloads drive explosive demand, data centres are hitting power and space constraints. Cisco Hypershield helps data centre operators evolve their infrastructure to provide the hyper-scale digital backbone needed for the AI revolution while maintaining security.

“Cisco Hypershield aims to address the complex security challenges of modern, AI-scale data centers,” said Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst of ZK Research. “Cisco’s vision of a self-managing fabric that seamlessly integrates from the network to the endpoint will help redefine what’s possible for security at scale.”

Cisco Hypershield is expected to be generally available in August 2024 as part of Cisco’s unified Security Cloud platform. It comes at a critical time, as cybercriminals exploit vulnerabilities faster than ever, often within 24 hours of disclosure.