Cisco introduced new capabilities and technologies across its networking portfolio that are designed to drive a more unified and integrated approach to managing and securing customer networks.

“As a market leader in both networking and security, and with visibility into over 1 billion endpoints, Cisco is in a unique position to build the industry’s premier AI-driven, secure and simple networking management platform, Cisco Networking Cloud,” said Jonathan Davidson, EVP and GM, Cisco Networking. “Whether it’s autonomous operations or simply delivering a trouble-free experience to an end user, endpoint and network data is key to AI-driven intelligence. The best data produces the best result, and Cisco has the best data.”

To address the needs of their users, Cisco is introducing new Cisco Networking Cloud innovations:

- New Integrations with Cisco Secure Access: Highlighting Cisco’s commitment to provide customers with the tools to bring networking and security teams closer together, Cisco is introducing deeper integrations between Cisco Networking and Security Cloud platforms. These innovations with Cisco Secure Access, Cisco’s Secure Services Edge (SSE) solution, deliver a unified approach to networking and security management, and automated monitoring of the digital experience, providing insights from network, device and application performance metrics. These integrations are available today with Catalyst SD-WAN and ThousandEyes.

- Enhanced security posture reporting for OT assets: Industrial organizations can now utilize the Security Posture report for comprehensive details on OT asset inventories, top vulnerabilities and highest cyber risks to help reduce the attack surface. These features are available with Cisco Cyber Vision and available as part of our hardened industrial-grade routers, switches, and firewalls.

To demonstrate how Cisco is continuing to converge its management platforms and work towards a unified portfolio experience, Cisco is introducing:

- Cloud Monitoring for Catalyst Wireless: First introduced as a capability for Catalyst switching, customers can now view select Catalyst wireless devices in the Meraki dashboard. This new capability gives Cisco customers a complete, cloud-managed view of their access networks. Cloud Monitoring for Catalyst Wireless supports the Catalyst 9800 Wireless Controllers and most Catalyst Wi-Fi 5 Wave 2, Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E access points.

- Catalyst 9300-M Cloud-Managed Switch Models: Cisco is continuing its journey to a single, unified hardware architecture with the new Catalyst 9300-M switches which will be managed natively from the Meraki dashboard. This is the first step in the evolution towards full cloud management for the Catalyst switching portfolio.

Cisco is also unveiling new technologies to help customers accelerate the adoption of AI by providing the right infrastructure for the right use cases.

- Cisco UCS X-Series Direct: An extension of Cisco’s industry-leading and award winning UCS X-Series Modular System, the new Cisco X-Series Direct is built for environments where customers need connectivity and compute power at the edge to support more applications with less infrastructure

- Cisco AI Validated Designs: Cisco is expanding its offering of converged and hyperconverged validated designs addressing new use cases, leveraging recently announced Cisco Validated Solutions and AI/ML blueprint for data center networks. These designs can accelerate AI/ML deployments and minimize risks by helping customers build high performance compute and data center network fabrics with automation and visibility tailored for a variety of AI-driven enterprise use cases.