Cisco launches Cloud Control platform to harness AI agents across enterprise infrastructure
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Cisco AI Canvas is here: the workspace for agentic operations
A year ago, at Cisco Live, we previewed Cisco AI Canvas, an agentic workspace where IT teams and AI agents investigate and resolve issues across every domain. It was built for teams that need to move from alert to evidence, from evidence to decision, and from decision to resolution faster. During
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Cisco Cloud Control: The Secure Harness for the Agentic Era
Every few decades, infrastructure gets a new abstraction. We went from racking hardware to virtualizing it, then from clicking through consoles to writing infrastructure as code. Each shift changed who could build, how fast they could move, and what was possible to defend. The next abstraction
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Cisco Live - how Cloud Control harnesses the power of agents in a post-Mythos world
Jeetu Patel, Cisco's President and Chief Product Officer started building the company's platform approach to the Cisco portfolio just under two years ago and Cisco Cloud Control is a core part of that approach. As Patel expressed it at Cisco Live last week: Cloud Control is the manifestation of
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Cisco's new cloud platform aimed at securing AI infrastructure
Cisco's new cloud platform aimed at securing AI infrastructure Cisco Systems Inc. today introduced a sweeping set of products and services designed to help enterprises manage, secure and automate increasingly complex information technology environments as artificial intelligence agents become
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Cisco Cloud Control: The opportunity for our partners
Customers are moving past the management of individual infrastructure domains via controller platforms. This search for seamless environments is being accelerated by agents and their workflows. To power this agentic future, we are evolving from simple disjointed visibility layers into a unified
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From signal to action: The next step in Cisco AgenticOps
Every enterprise now operates at the relentless speed of digital experience. Applications are more dynamic. Users connect from everywhere. Infrastructure spans campuses, branches, clouds, service providers, and the internet. And expectations continue to rise. NetOps teams are not short on data.
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Cisco Execs To Partners: Cloud Control, AI Security Push Create New Monetization Openings
Cisco executives told press and analysts at this week's Cisco Live conference that AI adoption will depend on security, simplification and scale, with partners central to Cloud Control rollout, monetization opportunities, infrastructure modernization and AI-era services. Top Cisco executives used
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The path to autonomous networking: Meet the agents helping win the AIOps race
Imagine managing a racing team during a championship race. Success is not determined by a single driver alone. It depends on a highly coordinated team operating in real time. Engineers analyze telemetry continuously. Strategists predict changing track conditions. Pit crews execute precision
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Cisco Unveils Cloud Control Platform to Power Agentic AI for Critical IT Infrastructure
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,
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Cisco Unveils Cloud Control, AI Canvas, Quantum Security Push At Cisco Live
Cisco rolls out new agentic AI, security and quantum-readiness technologies at Cisco Live, centering on Cisco Cloud Control, AI Canvas and Agent Studio to help customers manage AI-driven infrastructure, improve operations and telemetry, and prepare networks and encryption for post-quantum
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Cisco's New Weapon Against AI-Accelerated Cyber Attacks
Cisco Cloud Control brings together human operators and trusted AI agents to run the world's most critical systems 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
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Cisco Unveils Multicloud Fabric in Cloud Control: Network Ready for the AI Era
Enterprise applications no longer live in one cloud. Today, a single workload can span compute, data, and AI services across multiple cloud providers -- while users across thousands of branches and campuses need to access applications wherever they run, and those applications need to communicate
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Cisco Launches Agentic Platform to Defend and Automate Critical IT Infrastructure
Cisco Cloud Control brings together human operators and trusted AI agents to run the world's most critical systems 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
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Security Needs a New Operating Model
Security teams are not struggling because they lack tools. In most enterprises, the opposite is true. They have tools everywhere: firewalls, VPNs, identity systems, access controls, observability data, network telemetry, and cloud enforcement points. But together, they often create a new
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Cisco introduced Cloud Control at Cisco Live in Las Vegas, a unified operations platform designed to manage AI agents alongside human teams across networking, security, and infrastructure domains. The platform includes AI Canvas for collaborative investigations, Cloud Control Studio for building custom agents, and Live Protect for runtime security—marking what executives call Cisco's most consequential product announcement in years.
Cisco Cloud Control enters the agentic era
Cisco Systems has launched Cisco Cloud Control, positioning it as the secure foundation for enterprises entering what the company calls the agentic era. Announced at Cisco Live in Las Vegas, the unified operations platform integrates networking, security, compute, observability, and collaboration management into a single environment designed for both human administrators and AI agents
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. Jeff Schultz, senior vice president of portfolio strategy, described the announcements as "the most consequential that Cisco has made in many years"4
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Source: CRN
The platform addresses a fundamental shift in IT operations. As Jeetu Patel, Cisco's President and Chief Product Officer, expressed at Cisco Live, "Cloud Control is the manifestation of platform," serving as Cisco's creation of trusted autonomous infrastructure
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. The market catalyst driving this transformation is agentic AI, which requires critical infrastructure to respond to new threats and opportunities that AI agents bring to enterprise environments.Building a secure harness for AI-driven automation
Cisco frames Cloud Control as a "secure harness" for agentic operations, drawing parallels to how software development environments protect code generation
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. Just as tools like Codex and Claude Code provide developers with repositories, terminals, tests, and permissions, infrastructure needs similar safeguards when AI agents modify systems. The platform delivers six core capabilities: trusted access to enterprise infrastructure, normalized APIs for observing and managing every domain, identity and zero-trust controls built into the control path, real-time telemetry and operational context, enforcement points for runtime actions, and auditable governance that makes every agentic action transparent and reversible2
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Source: CXOToday
DJ Sampath, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's AI software and platform group, emphasized the human-AI interaction model: "It's not just about humans clicking through dashboards trying to keep up, but a true collaborative operating model where agents are doing the heavy lifting and humans are staying in control of what matters"
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. The platform enables AI agents to identify problems, perform root-cause analysis, recommend fixes, test changes on digital twins, and validate outcomes with human oversight.Cisco AI Canvas advances with Deep Reasoning Mode
Cisco AI Canvas, the collaborative workspace for AI agents and human operators, has moved from beta into Controlled Availability as an integrated component of Cisco Cloud Control
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. Originally previewed a year ago and tested in Meraki and Splunk environments, AI Canvas now operates as a unified workspace where teams investigate and resolve issues across every domain1
.The Controlled Availability release introduces Deep Reasoning Mode, built for complex, multi-domain problems requiring defensible answers. Unlike Default Mode, which handles everyday operational questions quickly, Deep Reasoning Mode creates a full troubleshooting plan grounded in best practices that operators can review, revise, or approve before execution
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. Every step, finding, and conclusion is sourced and supported by evidence, producing investigations that are easy to follow, defend, and hand off during incident resolution.
Source: Cisco
Additional capabilities include interactive generated widgets that provide topology maps, performance charts, and reports from live data; multimodal context that allows operators to incorporate screenshots, dashboards, and topology diagrams alongside telemetry; a built-in knowledge base for runbooks and SOPs; and a Board Library with Cisco-curated starting boards for common scenarios like security posture reviews and wireless troubleshooting
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. Context persists across shifts and escalations, ensuring operational knowledge isn't lost.Cloud Control Studio enables custom agent development
Cloud Control Studio serves as the design environment where customers and Cisco partners build and secure custom agents, applications, and workflows
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. The studio includes Agent Builder for creating AI agents connected to over 40 third-party platforms, including AWS, Google Cloud, ServiceNow, and PagerDuty through native integrations and the Model Context Protocol4
. App Builder enables users to create applications using natural-language prompts with integrated coding assistants including OpenAI Codex2
.Everything built in Cloud Control Studio can be discovered in the Cloud Control Marketplace, an open catalog where customers and partners find and extend capabilities
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. Importantly, customers and Cisco partners do not need a new license for Cloud Control, nor is Cisco charging an uplift for its use3
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Live Protect addresses post-Mythos security challenges
Tom Gillis, SVP and GM of the Infrastructure and Security Group at Cisco, highlighted Live Protect as "a step toward a new operating model for infrastructure"
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. The runtime capability, embedded directly into NX-OS, allows administrators to apply Cisco-validated interim controls to infrastructure between regular maintenance upgrades. When a new security advisory is released, Live Protect identifies systems exposed to vulnerabilities and creates temporary, targeted shields that mitigate risk without disrupting running systems3
.Gillis explained the vision: "Just as CI/CD enables lots of little changes in the software pipeline, we are bringing this approach to data centre infrastructure"
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. Once administrators are comfortable with shields, the system can operate autonomously, automatically addressing vulnerabilities—a critical capability in securing AI infrastructure as frontier AI models compress the time between vulnerability discovery and exploitation.Expanding opportunities for partners and enterprises
For Cisco partners, Cloud Control represents a shift from fragmented domain-by-domain operations to connected environments. The AI-native operations platform enables managed service teams to scale capacity significantly. According to Cisco, a team of 10 engineers typically handles 50-100 customer environments, with most time spent on repetitive triage and context-switching
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. With AI Canvas handling first-pass triage and cross-domain telemetry correlation, engineers can focus on high-value investigation and strategic guidance.Dilip Kumar, President and Global Head of Technology Solutions at NTT DATA, noted: "Our joint integration of Cisco AI Canvas and Cisco Cloud Control demonstrates the power of platform-level orchestration across multi-domain environments. The flexibility and API-driven architecture enabled seamless integration into our AI-native SDI Services model"
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.The platform's unified data layer, based on the Splunk log data analysis platform Cisco acquired two years ago, combines cross-domain telemetry with domain-specific AI models trained on Cisco's operational data
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. An AI Assistant provides a natural language interface with persistent context across connected domains, accelerating onboarding and investigation for IT operations teams5
.As enterprises face barriers to scaling agentic AI—including infrastructure limitations, trust deficits around autonomous systems, and telemetry data explosions—Cisco Cloud Control positions itself as the platform that makes agents safe to deploy and powerful enough to matter in production environments. Schultz emphasized the operational reality: "Every action that an agent takes is a combination of a routing challenge, a trust decision and a telemetry event"
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. With agents functioning as digital coworkers rather than productivity tools, infrastructure management must evolve to support continuous operation, inter-agent interaction, and direct system access—capabilities that conventional IT management tools weren't designed to handle.References
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