At Cisco Live 2026, Cisco unveiled a sweeping new operational framework designed to help enterprises manage and defend increasingly autonomous IT environments, introducing Cisco Cloud Control — a unified platform that combines infrastructure operations, AI-driven automation, and integrated cyber defense under what the company calls its new “AgenticOps” model.
The launch signals Cisco’s broader effort to redefine how enterprises operate critical infrastructure as AI agents become embedded across networking, security, observability, collaboration, and cloud operations. The platform is intended to provide organizations with a centralized operational layer in which human operators and AI systems collaborate through shared telemetry, workflows, and contextual intelligence.
Cisco executives framed the announcement as a response to the growing operational complexity and escalating cyber risk created by autonomous systems and machine-speed attacks.
“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 at Cisco, during the company’s keynote presentation at Cisco Live in Las Vegas.
Cisco Cloud Control Designed as Centralized AI Operations Layer
Cisco Cloud Control consolidates management across Cisco networking, security, compute, observability, and collaboration environments into a single operational interface. The company says the platform is designed to provide both human administrators and AI agents with access to the same data, operational context, and system workflows.
The platform also introduces natural-language development capabilities that allow enterprises to create custom operational applications and AI agents directly within the environment. Cisco says the platform integrates with a broad third-party ecosystem that includes Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, ServiceNow, Slack, PagerDuty, Google Cloud, and Wiz.
A major component of the platform is Cisco AI Canvas, a collaborative workspace that enables operators and AI systems to investigate and resolve incidents together in real time while maintaining operational continuity across shifts and escalations.
Another centerpiece is Cloud Control Studio, a development environment where organizations can build customized AI agents and workflow applications aligned with their governance policies and operational requirements. Cisco says the system supports integrations with more than 50 third-party platforms through native connectors and the open Model Context Protocol.
The company also highlighted its Deep Network Model, an AI model trained on decades of Cisco operational networking data, designed to improve automated reasoning and infrastructure decision-making.
Cisco Cloud Control entered controlled availability in the United States this week, with broader global rollout planned later this year.
Security Strategy Expands Beyond Traditional Defense Models
Much of Cisco’s announcement focused on the accelerating collapse of the time window between vulnerability disclosure and active exploitation, a trend the company says is being intensified by generative and agentic AI.
Cisco executives described the current threat landscape as one where reactive security operations are increasingly ineffective, particularly as attackers begin leveraging frontier AI models to automate reconnaissance, exploit development, and operational attacks.
As part of that strategy, Cisco announced an expansion of its Live Protect capability, which the company describes as a runtime protection mechanism that shields infrastructure devices from newly discovered vulnerabilities without requiring reboots, upgrades, or maintenance windows.
Initially available for Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches, Live Protect is expected to expand across additional switching and routing platforms later this year.
Cisco also expanded its Hybrid Mesh Firewall architecture, which extends security policy enforcement across networks and applications, and across Cisco and third-party firewall environments, to reduce lateral movement and limit the attack blast radius.
AI Security and Agent Governance Become New Operational Priority
Cisco positioned AI agent security as another major operational concern, arguing that organizations will increasingly need to secure both the AI systems themselves and the environments in which those systems operate.
The company outlined continued investments in AI Defense, Zero Trust protections for AI agents, and its emerging “Agentic SOC” vision, which aims to enable machine-speed detection and response capabilities.
Cisco also disclosed participation in initiatives such as Anthropic’s Project Glasswing and OpenAI’s Daybreak, which focus on stress-testing products against advanced AI-driven attack methodologies.
In parallel, Cisco announced it has open-sourced its Foundry Security Specification framework to help organizations evaluate AI-driven security systems and operational resilience.
Quantum-Safe Infrastructure Push Accelerates
Cisco also used the event to intensify its messaging around post-quantum security preparedness, warning that “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks are already underway as adversaries collect encrypted data for future decryption once quantum computing capabilities mature.
The company committed to enabling quantum-safe communications capabilities across the majority of its core portfolio by the end of 2026. Cisco says future campus, branch, and data center networking platforms will ship with quantum-safe secure boot capabilities enabled by default.
To help organizations assess exposure, Cisco introduced new Quantum Ready Assessments through Cisco IQ, its AI-enabled services and support platform. The assessments are designed to identify systems most vulnerable to future post-quantum cryptographic compromise and prioritize remediation planning.
Cisco also unveiled a broader Quantum Resilience Framework intended to guide enterprises through migration toward post-quantum cryptographic architectures.
Services and Resilience Offerings Target Long-Term Infrastructure Risk
Complementing the platform announcements, Cisco introduced new service offerings focused on long-term infrastructure resilience and operational modernization.
The company’s new Resilient Infrastructure Services program combines exposure assessment, infrastructure modernization, and resilience planning to help organizations mitigate risks associated with increasingly sophisticated AI-enabled threats.
Cisco IQ, now integrated directly into Cisco Cloud Control, serves as the company’s AI-powered support and professional services platform. Cisco says the system uses AI-driven insights and Zero Trust principles to help enterprises evaluate operational exposure, lifecycle risks, and infrastructure vulnerabilities.
The platform will also support on-premises deployment options for organizations with data sovereignty requirements.
Additional benchmarking capabilities will enable enterprises to compare infrastructure support risk, vulnerability exposure, and lifecycle management metrics with anonymized peer organizations in similar industries and operational profiles.
Cisco expects broader global availability for several Cisco IQ and quantum assessment capabilities beginning in July 2026.