As enterprises adopt agentic AI, data centers and infrastructure have to be secure and ready, according to Cisco. Here are the latest security innovations for the data center and branch that the tech giant unveiled at Cisco Live 2025.
Agentic AI promises productivity gains that are largely net positive so it’s important to remember that every agent is an attack surface, said Craig Connors, vice president and CTO of Cisco Systems’ Infrastructure and Security Group.
“We have to marry AI-ready infrastructure to support the productivity gains that these agents will provide with built-in security to secure the use of these agents to make sure that we’re doing it safely. In our view, this is not two projects; this is one fabric,” Connors said.
Cisco, which has been building out its security profile in recent years, is on a mission to fuse zero-trust networking and AI operations all the way from the silicon in the chips that the company builds to the Security Operations Center, Connors said. Because of its focus on networking and security, Cisco is “uniquely positioned to enable organizations to deploy and protect AI at scale,” he said.
To that end, the San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant at Cisco Live 2025 unveiled a handful of security innovations for the data center and branch. Here are the latest AI security, secure data center and firewall offerings that Cisco partners should know about.
Unified Fabric Experience With Nexus
A “long-awaited” feature for customers, the new unified fabric Experience with Nexus will let customers simplify network operations by converging ACI and NX-OS VXLAN EVPN fabrics with unified data, control, policy enforcement and management, all in one dashboard, Connors said.
The Unified Nexus Dashboard consolidates services across LAN, SAN, IPFM, and AI/ML fabrics, the company said. Cisco will also add AI Assistant into the Nexus Dashboard to troubleshoot with natural
language interaction and offer up intelligent recommendations. The Cisco AI Assistant in Nexus
Dashboard will be available later this year.
The unified fabric Experience with Nexus will be available in July 2025.
Expanded AI PODs
Cisco is expanding its AI PODs, which are already flexible and scalable for diverse AI use cases, such as
training, fine-tuning as well as other use cases that are happening in enterprise data centers. To do that, Cisco is continuing to work closely with Nvidia, Connors said.
The Nvidia RTX 6000 Pro is now orderable with Cisco UCS C845A M8 servers. The companies together have pledged to continue to deliver validated solutions as part of the Cisco Secure AI Factory with Nvidia to ensure secure AI solutions, Cisco said.
400G Bidirectional Optics
The speed of networking needed to keep up with AI workloads is a challenge to keep up with, Connors said. With that obstacle in mind, Cisco is releasing novel, 400G bidirectional (BiDi) optics, which lets customers easily transition to 400G networks while preserving their existing duplex multimode fiber
infrastructure to keep costs reasonable, while also giving them infrastructure that can scale, Connors said.
The new optics will be available in the second half of 2025.
Cisco Secure Firewall 6100 Series
The data center improvements that Cisco is revealing at the event blend into its security strategy, Connors said. To that end, the company is introducing the Cisco Secure Firewall 6100 Series, which addresses complexity, cost and scalability, Cisco said.
The modular scalable data center firewall offers the highest performance density for data center
firewalling—200 Gbps per rack unit, and it can be managed from Cisco Security Cloud, Cisco said.
“Not only does [Cisco] have the next-generation hardware for the data center at a firewall level but a way to tie the security policy for all of these pieces together seamlessly,” Connors said.
Cisco Secure Firewall 200 Series
For the branch, Cisco is also rolling out the Cisco Secure Firewall 200 Series. This offering provides advanced on-box threat inspection and integrated SD-WAN for distributed branches at up to
3X the price-performance compared with Cisco’s competition, Connors said.
