Unveiled today at Cisco Live, Cisco Cloud Control is set to redefine how IT infrastructure is managed and protected through its innovative blend of human and AI agent collaboration. The platform offers a singular interface for managing networking, security, compute, observability, and collaboration, granting users a secure and unified operational view. This development marks the foundation for Cisco's AgenticOps operating model, where both people and AI agents work cohesively from a shared data layer, maintaining human oversight while enabling the creation of custom applications and agents in natural language within the platform.
Cisco Cloud Control integrates seamlessly with a broad ecosystem, partnering with industry giants such as AWS, Linear, Microsoft, PagerDuty, ServiceNow, Slack, and Google Cloud, now also featuring Wiz. As Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer of Cisco, stated, "AI agents reason and act continuously at software speed, and that changes everything about how we scale, manage, and defend our critical infrastructure." This integration provides users with a comprehensive view of their IT environment via a single login, facilitating management and rapid response across various platforms.
AI and Cross-Domain Telemetry
Moreover, Cisco Cloud Control empowers operators with autonomous agents
Designed to operate as a single management plane, Cisco Cloud Control brings diverse domains into a coherent system where cross-domain telemetry allows for enriched data integration.
This approach ensures that both humans and AI agents operate from the same set of data, crucial for maintaining uptime, monitoring agent activities, and understanding complex business metrics like tokenomics. The platform utilizes purpose-built models, including the Deep Network Model informed by Cisco’s extensive networking history, to offer scalable intelligence solutions.
Moreover, Cisco Cloud Control empowers operators with autonomous agents, facilitating a structured path from signal detection to corrective actions. These agents, reinforced by Cisco’s telemetry and specialized models, enable teams to automate network operations while ensuring transparency and regulatory compliance. Additional features such as Expanded Experience Metrics and the Cisco AI Canvas offer dynamic, real-time collaboration spaces for resolving issues efficiently.
Enhanced Security Features
Cisco Cloud Control serves as the command center for real-time defense operations
As security threats evolve, Cisco Cloud Control serves as the command center for real-time defense operations. With its entry into Controlled Availability in the United States, Cisco underscores the urgency of proactive security measures. By open-sourcing its Foundry Security Spec, Cisco enables global defenders to adopt rigorous, AI-driven security evaluations to protect against vulnerabilities swiftly.
The platform incorporates Live Protect, acting as a digital immune system that automatically mitigates new vulnerabilities during runtime without necessitating reboots or maintenance interruptions. This feature is currently available in N9000 series switches and plans to expand across more Cisco products. Additionally, the Hybrid Mesh Firewall offers integrated protection across various network layers, limiting potential damage from breaches.
Quantum-Safe Innovations
Addressing emerging quantum threats, Cisco has announced advancements in quantum-safe communications, pledging that by December 2026, its core portfolio will accommodate these capabilities. Starting immediately, new infrastructure such as campus, branch, and data center equipment will feature quantum-safe secure boot technologies, advancing the network's resilience against potential future threats.
Cisco IQ, an integral part of Cloud Control, is designed to enhance infrastructure resilience through AI-powered services. Alongside Peer Benchmarking, which provides comparative insights on security risks, Cisco IQ fosters long-term defensive strategies, ensuring that clients are equipped to address the complexities of today's threat landscape and emerge stronger.
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.
Single management plane
“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."
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.
AI-driven security evaluations
Cisco Cloud Control enters Controlled Availability in United States today, with Global Availability to follow. 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.
Digital immune system
Live Protect acts as a digital immune system for Cisco products, shielding them from newly discovered and prioritised 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.
Agentic security offerings
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. Today, Cisco announced further enhancements across its agentic security offerings, from AI Defense, to Zero Trust for agents, to the Agentic SOC.
"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 Modernisation, 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 anonymised 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.
