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One of the biggest risks organizations face today when configuring networks and firewalls is the complexity and resulting misconfigurations. Gartner has predicted that almost all firewall breaches this year will be due to these errors. This presents a significant opportunity for AI to show its worth to Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and Chief Information Officers (CIOs). If a hybrid cloud setup or firewall is not correctly configured, it can cause undetected breaches that are discovered too late.
Cisco has been tackling these risks for its customers for years. They’ve now fully embraced AI with their new Cisco AI Assistant for Security and the AI-powered Encrypted Visibility Engine. The AI Assistant leverages one of the world’s largest security-focused data sets, analyzing more than 550 billion security events daily.
Cisco’s Encrypted Visibility Engine is designed to inspect encrypted traffic without the usual operational, privacy, and compliance concerns that come with decrypting traffic for inspection.
Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and general manager of security and collaboration at Cisco, emphasized their strategy: integrating AI deeply into the core of Cisco’s security offerings to enhance every aspect of their security operations.
Firewall complexity is a significant threat, and Cisco has targeted this area with its comprehensive AI cybersecurity release at the end of 2023. Configuring firewalls, maintaining current patches and policies, and addressing vulnerabilities can be incredibly time-consuming and prone to negligence.
Firewalls, which have been around for decades, are in need of innovation. Gartner predicts that by 2026, over 60% of organizations will use more than one type of firewall deployment, leading to the adoption of hybrid mesh firewalls. Also, by that year, more than 30% of new deployments for branch-office firewalls will be firewall-as-a-service offerings, significantly up from less than 10% in 2022.
Cisco aims to tackle this complexity by using AI to streamline and automate firewall management. They focus on policy identification and reporting, troubleshooting, and policy lifecycle management.
Raj Chopra, SVP and Chief Product Officer of Cisco’s security business group, described their generative tool built to simplify firewall management, using advanced natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to provide quick, efficient answers.
What’s clear from the AI Assistant for Security’s design is Cisco’s plan to integrate more AI assistants across various roles within their Security Cloud, moving towards a cross-domain security platform with AI-assisted automation for analysis and reporting tasks.
However, AI tools still require human oversight to continuously learn and provide useful information in context. Merritt Baer, Field CISO at Lacework, explained that AI engines help internal users understand their permissions better and facilitate interaction with security insights and analytics.
The integration of human input into AI assistant workflows is evident across various products. Cisco’s AI Assistant for Security supports multiple standard roles right out of the gate, similar to products from other companies like Airgap Networks, CrowdStrike, Google Cloud, Lacework, Microsoft, and Zscaler, which can flexibly adapt to different roles without needing reconfiguration.
In conclusion, the success of AI-driven cybersecurity tools in addressing human-in-the-middle dynamics will significantly influence their adoption and effectiveness in securing organizations.