Cisco Systems, Inc.

Cisco Cloud Control brings together human operators and trusted AI agents to run the world's most critical systems

News summary:

• Cisco Cloud Control is a unified platform built for humans and AI agents to run critical IT infrastructure together. It brings Cisco platforms together and advances Cisco's AgenticOps vision, allowing customers to build their own apps and agents in natural language, and extending to third-party tools.
• With AI accelerating the window between vulnerability and exploit from weeks to minutes, Cisco announces several security innovations, including the expansion of Live Protect to shield more Cisco products from new vulnerabilities at runtime – no reboots, no upgrades, no downtime.
• New Cisco IQ capabilities help customers build long-term resilience against tomorrow's threats. Resilient Infrastructure Services helps customers stay ahead of frontier model risk, while the new Quantum Ready Assessments identify the assets most exposed to "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks - and where to start.

LAS VEGAS, June 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Cisco Live US -- 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.

"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."

One platform for humans and agents to run the agentic enterprise

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.

Cisco Cloud Control enters Controlled Availability in United States today, with Global Availability to follow.

Security for the Mythos era, fused directly into the infrastructure

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.

Always-on defense across the infrastructure

Live Protect acts as a digital immune system for Cisco products, shielding them from newly discovered and prioritized 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.

Protecting agents from the world, and the world from agents

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 (link to RSAC blog). Today, Cisco announced further enhancements across its agentic security offerings, from AI Defense, to Zero Trust for agents, to the Agentic SOC.

Clear path to quantum-safe infrastructure.

"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 Modernization, 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 anonymized 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.

Read more in our executive blogs:

• Navigating the Frontier of Agentic AI
• What we're announcing at Cisco Live and why it couldn't wait
• The Network is the Foundation: Powering the Agentic AI Era
• Building the Intelligence Layer for Trusted Agentic Operations
• From AI Ambition to Industrial Scale Infrastructure
• Cisco IQ: Scaling Secure Resilience
• Cisco IQ: Intelligence that Elevates Partners

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide technology leader that is revolutionizing the way organizations connect and protect in the AI era. For more than 40 years, Cisco has securely connected the world. With its industry leading AI-powered solutions and services, Cisco enables its customers, partners and communities to unlock innovation, enhance productivity and strengthen digital resilience. With purpose at its core, Cisco remains committed to creating a more connected and inclusive future for all. Discover more on The Newsroom and follow us on X at @Cisco. 

Disclaimer:

Some products or features described may be in various stages of development and offered on a when-and-if available basis.

SOURCE Cisco Systems, Inc.

• $600 Billion Annual Impact: Aggregate downtime costs for the Global 2000 have soared 50% in two years.
• $15,000 Per Minute: The average cost of downtime for organizations, highlighting the immediate financial impact of service disruptions.
• 3.4% Stock Price Drop: The average decline in shareholder value following a single downtime incident.

SAN JOSE, Calif., May 19, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Cisco today announced the release of Splunk's latest research, The Hidden Costs of Downtime, revealing the aggregate cost of unplanned downtime for Global 2000 companies has surged to $600 billion annually – a 50% increase in just two years.

In partnership with Oxford Economics, the Splunk study shows that the financial toll of an outage is immediate, severe, and potentially long-lasting. Downtime has become a systemic business crisis that threatens revenue, brand equity and shareholder value, costing an organization $95 million in lost revenue annually. This is nearly twice the level seen in 2024.

"Downtime is inevitable; prolonged disruption is not," said Kamal Hathi, SVP and GM, Splunk, a Cisco company. "The most resilient organizations are not the ones with the most tools or the biggest vision for AI. They are the ones that align technology with business outcomes, empower people with context, and design systems that bend, but do not break, under pressure."

The Business Impact of Downtime

Technology executives increasingly view the consequences of an outage as more severe. Publicly disclosing a data breach is now considered the most severe hidden cost, with 71% of technology executives rating it as very or prohibitively disruptive, up from 23% in 2024. Furthermore, downtime triggers a chain reaction of hidden costs, including:

• Financial and Market Erosion: The study found that the average cost of downtime has reached $15,000 per minute. In addition, organizations see an average 3.4% drop in stock price following a downtime event.
• Customer Churn: Eighty-one percent of technology leaders cite the loss of customers as a consequence of downtime, with 47% admitting customers are often or very often the first to detect service degradation or outages.
• Escalating Ransomware Costs: Ransomware payouts have nearly tripled since 2024, now reaching $40 million on average, making them one of the most significant direct financial burdens.
• Regulatory Exposure: Regulatory fines have reached an average of $51 million per organization, with 57% of technology executives now viewing these penalties as very or prohibitively disruptive.
• Operational Drag: A staggering 89% of tech leaders cite the need for large numbers of personnel to fix issues. Nearly all (90%) tech leaders report increased demand for customer support with 76% of finance and 74% of marketing executives feeling the pressure as well.
• Brand Recovery: Nearly 20% of marketing professionals report that it takes an entire quarter to recover brand health following remediation.

The Intersection of Security and Downtime

About one-third (36%) of security leaders admit that downtime is often or very often misclassified as an IT issue, which can give attackers a critical head start. A lack of shared context complicates resolution, as only 38% of technology executives report consistently identifying the root cause of a downtime incident. The perceived frequency of cybersecurity-related downtime caused by SaaS and other third-party application issues has nearly tripled since 2024, with 56% of security leaders now experiencing these issues often or very often. Maintaining basic cyber hygiene and modernizing legacy infrastructure to replace outdated, unpatchable technology remain foundational to preventing unplanned downtime.

The Evolving Role of AI in Resilience

Organizations are increasingly turning to AI to enhance incident triage and root cause analysis, with a median annual spend of $24.5 million on AI tools that prevent and respond to downtime. As these technologies mature, the industry is shifting toward a model of human-to-agent collaboration, where AI serves the expert rather than replacing human oversight. This approach relies on machine data, the logs, metrics, and traces that allow teams to monitor AI actions, detect issues early, and correct course before minor errors escalate into full-scale outages.

The data reveals that organizations identified as "AI Workflow and Triage Experts," are significantly better equipped to avoid the most damaging outcomes of downtime:

• Higher Resilience for AI Experts: 74% of these experts avoided the need to publicly disclose a data breach last year, compared to just 54% of non-experts.
• Customer Retention: These expert organizations are nearly three times more likely to report that they have never lost customers due to downtime (42% versus 15% for non-experts).

Despite the clear benefits, the transition to autonomous systems is not without challenges. While 56% of users report that AI has reduced their overall risk, every technology leader surveyed admitted their organization has experienced some form of AI-related downtime. Sixty-eight percent of technology leaders express concern their AI agents will behave unpredictably, underscoring the need for robust governance and human-in-the-loop oversight that defines true digital resilience.

Building True Resilience

Technology executives increasingly recognize the need to visualize the entire digital dependency chain. In fact, among organizations with the lowest downtime costs, a massive 98% confirm that end-to-end visibility is very or extremely important for reducing incidents. Nevertheless, complete visibility remains rare across IT domains, prompting organizations to shift their investment strategies toward more proactive, data-driven foundations:

• Prioritizing Observability: About three-fourths of ITOps and engineering leaders identify end-to-end observability as their top investment priority to improve infrastructure resilience, taking precedence over traditional hardware or data center upgrades.
• Automating to Reduce Human Error: Sixty-six percent of ITOps and engineering leaders are prioritizing investments in automation to mitigate the risks of human error, which remains the leading cause of downtime across the technology stack.
• Targeting AI Investments: Organizations are focusing their AI budgets on high-impact areas, with 85% of technology leaders prioritizing AI-driven security automation and 65% investing in AI-powered observability to gain deeper, real-time insights into their digital ecosystems.

For further details on methodology and findings of The Hidden Costs of Downtime report, please visit the Splunk website.

Methodology

Oxford Economics fielded a hybrid survey using CATI (Computer Assisted Telephonic Interviewing) and online methods. The fieldwork captured responses from 2,000 executives from Global 2000 companies. Businesses from 20 countries are represented from APAC, EMEA, North America, and LATAM. Respondents hail from nine industry groups: financial services, retail and consumer goods, public sector, manufacturing, energy and utilities, healthcare and life sciences, information services and technology, transportation and logistics, and communications and media. Respondents come from technology (including security, IT, and engineering titles), finance (including Chief Financial Officers), and marketing functions (including Chief Marketing Officers).

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide technology leader that is revolutionizing the way organizations connect and protect in the AI era. For more than 40 years, Cisco has securely connected the world. With its industry leading AI-powered solutions and services, Cisco enables its customers, partners and communities to unlock innovation, enhance productivity and strengthen digital resilience. With purpose at its core, Cisco remains committed to creating a more connected and inclusive future for all. Discover more on The Newsroom and follow us on X at @Cisco.

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at http://www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word 'partner' does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company.

About Splunk LLC

Splunk, a Cisco company, helps build a safer and more resilient digital world. Organizations trust Splunk to prevent security, infrastructure and application issues from becoming major incidents, absorb shocks from digital disruptions, and accelerate digital transformation.

Splunk and the Splunk> logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at http://www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word "'partner"' does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco or its affiliates and any other company.

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SOURCE Cisco Systems, Inc.