Cisco and NVIDIA Advance Security for Enterprise AI Factories

Cisco and NVIDIA are helping set a new standard for secure, scalable and high-performance enterprise AI.

Announced today at the Cisco Live conference in San Diego, the Cisco AI Defense and Hypershield security solutions tap into NVIDIA AI to deliver comprehensive visibility, validation and runtime protection across entire AI workflows. This builds on the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA unveiled at the NVIDIA GTC conference in March.

As AI moves to the center of every industry, enterprises need more than just speed — they need trust. From data ingestion and model training to deployment and inference, Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA can provide continuous monitoring and protection of AI workloads.

Cisco AI Defense and Hypershield integrate with NVIDIA AI for high-performance, scalable and more trustworthy AI responses for running agentic and generative AI workloads. The NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory validated design now includes Cisco AI Defense and Hypershield to safeguard every stage of the AI lifecycle — which is key to helping enterprises confidently deploy AI at scale.

Open models post-trained with NVIDIA NeMo and safeguarded with NVIDIA Blueprints can now be validated and secured using AI Defense. Cisco security, privacy and safety models run as NVIDIA NIM microservices to optimize inference performance for production AI. Cisco AI Defense provides runtime visibility and monitoring of AI applications and agents deployed on the NVIDIA AI platform.

Cisco Hypershield will soon work seamlessly with NVIDIA BlueField DPUs and the NVIDIA DOCA Argus framework, bringing pervasive, distributed security and real-time threat detection to every node of the AI infrastructure.

Whether their workloads are running in a data center or at the edge, organizations can benefit from this real-time threat detection at the network, server and application layers. Together, NVIDIA and Cisco are enabling enterprises to maintain zero-trust security across distributed AI environments, no matter where data and workloads reside.

Maximizing AI Networking Performance

AI workloads are data hungry and latency sensitive. To meet these demands, Cisco and NVIDIA have enhanced AI networking with:

• Cisco Intelligent Packet Flow: Dynamically steers traffic using real-time telemetry and congestion awareness, optimizing performance across AI fabrics.
• NVIDIA Spectrum-X: This AI-optimized Ethernet platform delivers high-throughput, low-latency connectivity with advanced routing and congestion control.
• End-to-End Visibility: Unified monitoring across networks, GPUs and distributed AI jobs means issues are detected proactively — before they impact performance or security.

Expanded AI PODs for Flexible, Scalable AI

To support the evolving needs of enterprise AI, Cisco is expanding its AI PODs — modular, validated building blocks for diverse AI workloads, including training, fine-tuning and inference. This flexibility lets organizations scale AI initiatives efficiently and securely, whether deploying a handful of models or running massive, distributed AI factories.

The new NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server GPU is now available for order with Cisco UCS C845A M8 servers, providing exceptional performance for next-generation AI applications.

Learn more about the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, a blueprint for organizations to confidently scale AI, accelerate innovation and protect their most valuable assets.