Cisco Unveils Agentic Platform for Operating and Defending Critical IT Infrastructure
Cisco Cloud Control brings together human operators and trusted AI agents to run the world's most critical systems
News summary:
- Cisco Cloud Control is a unified platform built for humans and AI agents to run critical IT infrastructure together. It brings Cisco platforms together and advances Cisco's AgenticOps vision, allowing customers to build their own apps and agents in natural language, and extending to third-party tools.
- With AI accelerating the window between vulnerability and exploit from weeks to minutes, Cisco announces several security innovations, including the expansion of Live Protect to shield more Cisco products from new vulnerabilities at runtime – no reboots, no upgrades, no downtime.
- New Cisco IQ capabilities help customers build long-term resilience against tomorrow's threats. Resilient Infrastructure Services helps customers stay ahead of frontier model risk, while the new Quantum Ready Assessments identify the assets most exposed to "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks - and where to start.
LAS VEGAS, June 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Cisco Live US -- In an agentic AI world, organizations must act and defend at machine speed and scale. Cisco Cloud Control, unveiled today at Cisco Live, is a unified platform built for humans and AI agents to manage, monitor and defend critical IT infrastructure — and the foundation for Cisco's AgenticOps operating model.
With one login, Cisco Cloud Control delivers a single view of Cisco networking, security, compute, observability, and collaboration in one secure environment. People and agents work from a single data layer, sharing the same operational context and the same system of action, while humans stay in control. Customers can build their own applications and agents using natural language directly within the platform, which also connects to a large ecosystem, including AWS, Linear, Microsoft, PagerDuty, ServiceNow, Slack, and Google Cloud, which now includes Wiz.
"AI agents reason and act continuously at software speed, and that changes everything about how we scale, manage, and defend our critical infrastructure," said Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco. "Cisco Cloud Control is a command center for agentic AI: a platform where your team and your AI agents work together, in the same environment, with the same information, and with humans in control."
One platform for humans and agents to run the agentic enterprise
Cisco Cloud Control is the single management plane that brings a customer's entire estate into one environment — one login, one view. It's a new way to run critical infrastructure that ties together:
- Cross-domain telemetry. The rich data flowing across networking, security, observability, collaboration, and more — comes together in Cloud Control so humans and agents can act on the same information to address key business imperatives like uptime, agent behavior, and tokenomics.
- Purpose-built models. Cloud Control reasons across complex problems with the right mix of purpose-built and frontier models — including Cisco's Deep Network Model, grounded in 40 years of Cisco operational networking data. The result is system intelligence that scales with the complexity of the problem, not the size of the model alone.
- Trusted agents. Through Cisco Cloud Control, operators will be able to work with autonomous agents that can follow a structured path from signal to action: spotting trouble, identifying causes, carrying out fixes, testing changes before deployment, and confirming the user experience has recovered. These agents will be powered by Cisco telemetry and purpose-built models, and they will leverage other capabilities, such as Expanded Experience Metrics, Deep Reasoning, Digital Twin, and Cisco Agentic Workflows. Teams will be able to automate network ops with an agentic loop, while keeping actions visible and governed.
- Cisco AI Canvas. A multiplayer, generative workspace where operators and agents work from the same live evidence to investigate and resolve complex issues together in real time. Context persists across shifts and escalations, so nothing is lost, and nothing is repeated.
- Cloud Control Studio. The design space that unlocks two customization environments. Agent Builder lets customers build agents for Cloud Control tailored to their own policies and workflows, with the ability to connect to more than 50+ third-party platforms and tools through native connectors or the open Model Context Protocol (MCP). App Builder lets customers build and publish apps and workflows for Cloud Control from natural-language prompt, with OpenAI Codex, an agentic platform that helps you build and ship with AI, built in. Everything built in Studio — plus agents and apps from across Cisco's ecosystem — can be published to Cloud Control Marketplace.
Cisco Cloud Control enters Controlled Availability in United States today, with Global Availability to follow.
Security for the Mythos era, fused directly into the infrastructure
Reactive defense is no longer enough when the window between vulnerability and exploit has collapsed from weeks to minutes. As a charter member of Anthropic's Project Glasswing and OpenAI's Daybreak, Cisco stress-tests its own products using the latest frontier AI models — finding the weaknesses adversaries would, before they can. Cisco isn't keeping that advantage to itself: through the recently open-sourced Foundry Security Spec, every defender can apply that same rigor to their AI-driven security evaluations.
Cisco is expanding protections across its infrastructure to shield customers from new vulnerabilities quickly following discovery — with Cisco Cloud Control as the security command center where defense plays out in real time.
Always-on defense across the infrastructure
Live Protect acts as a digital immune system for Cisco products, shielding them from newly discovered and prioritized vulnerabilities for supported platforms at runtime — no reboots, no upgrades, no maintenance windows. Now available in N9000 series switches and included with the Nexus One product entitlement, Live Protect is expanding to more products in the Cisco Portfolio in the coming months, starting with campus and branch smart switches, followed by secure routers later in the year.
Hybrid Mesh Firewall extends unified protection across networks, applications, and Cisco and third-party firewalls — limiting the blast radius when something goes wrong.
Protecting agents from the world, and the world from agents
AI agents are joining the workforce, working alongside humans, and taking on tasks that require a secure environment. At RSAC, Cisco announced an array of new innovations to protect agents from the world, protect the world from agents, and detect and respond to issues at machine speed (link to RSAC blog). Today, Cisco announced further enhancements across its agentic security offerings, from AI Defense, to Zero Trust for agents, to the Agentic SOC.
Clear path to quantum-safe infrastructure.
"Harvest now, decrypt later" attacks are already happening, collecting encrypted data to unlock when quantum capabilities catch up. Cisco is turning tomorrow's threat into a plan enterprises can start building today:
- New Quantum-safe communications advancements across Cisco's core portfolio. With a commitment to enable quantum-safe communications capabilities across the majority of Cisco's core portfolio by December 2026, Cisco is extending post-quantum protection to the systems where the most sensitive enterprise traffic flows.
- Quantum-safe by default for new infrastructure. Starting today and moving forward, any newly introduced campus, branch and data center routers, switches, and firewall series will launch with quantum-safe secure boot. This builds on the same quantum-safe technology already shipping in campus smart switches.
- The new Quantum Ready Assessments, available through Cisco IQ, identify the assets most exposed to "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks — and where to start. Global availability planned for July 2026.
- The new Quantum Resilience Framework gives enterprises a structured approach to post-quantum cryptography across two pillars: quantum-safe communications and quantum-safe products.
Long-term resilience with Cisco
To help customers navigate this new era, Cisco Services is announcing new capabilities:
- Resilient Infrastructure Services, delivered through Cisco Support and Professional Services, is a new three-step approach — Exposure Assessment, Infrastructure Modernization, Defense Resiliency — that helps customers mitigate risk from frontier model threats.
- Cisco IQ, fully integrated into Cisco Cloud Control, is Cisco's AI-powered delivery vehicle for Support and Professional Services. It's helping customers build the long-term resilience that today's threat landscape demands with a Resilient Infrastructure Playbook, built with AI-driven insights and Zero Trust principles.
- Supporting customers with data sovereignty requirements, Cisco IQ will now support on-premises deployment options.
- Cisco IQ's Peer Benchmarking uses anonymized data to provide data-driven insights on areas such as Last Day of Support (LDOS) risk exposure and security vulnerability rates, enabling comparison with organizations of similar size, sector, or infrastructure profile.
Global availability planned for July 2026.
Read more in our executive blogs:
- Navigating the Frontier of Agentic AI
- What we're announcing at Cisco Live and why it couldn't wait
- The Network is the Foundation: Powering the Agentic AI Era
- Building the Intelligence Layer for Trusted Agentic Operations
- From AI Ambition to Industrial Scale Infrastructure
- Cisco IQ: Scaling Secure Resilience
- Cisco IQ: Intelligence that Elevates Partners
About Cisco
Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide technology leader that is revolutionizing the way organizations connect and protect in the AI era. For more than 40 years, Cisco has securely connected the world. With its industry leading AI-powered solutions and services, Cisco enables its customers, partners and communities to unlock innovation, enhance productivity and strengthen digital resilience. With purpose at its core, Cisco remains committed to creating a more connected and inclusive future for all. Discover more on The Newsroom and follow us on X at @Cisco.
Disclaimer:
Some products or features described may be in various stages of development and offered on a when-and-if available basis.
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