Cisco Secure Networking Ready for AI, Secure by Design

Bassam Khan of Cisco outlined the company’s secure networking strategy and argued that being AI ready and being secure are inseparable. He examined how agentic AI traffic changes network behavior, how the post-Mythos surge in reported vulnerabilities raises the stakes, and how Cisco’s three pillars of trusting the network, protecting every flow, and assuring every experience fit together. Kiran Ghodgaonkar opened Cisco’s Networking Field Day 41 appearance by previewing a day that brought together Cisco’s security and networking teams, then handed off to Khan.

Khan described agents as the new workforce and inference as the new workload, and he pointed to a recent Cisco research report on production traffic. AI flows last about twice as long as non-AI flows because agents hold sessions open while they wait on inference, which puts pressure on stateful devices like firewalls and NAC gateways. Agentic traffic also sends far more data upstream to frontier models as prompts and context grow, and it runs at machine speed. On security, he showed reported CVEs spiking in the post-Mythos era. He noted that Cisco was one of 12 vendors in Anthropic’s Project Glasswing and reviewed 1.8 billion lines of code across more than 25 languages, which Cisco’s security leadership called eight years of work in eight weeks. A demo showed a high-severity DNS alert, unresolved for nine days and flagged for possible hijacking, that an operator could ask about in plain language.

Khan called the network a must-have layer in post-Mythos defense in depth, because it sees everything while other tools come and go. Trusting the network depends on hardened IOS XE, runtime checks, hardware verification, Live Protect shielding, and post-quantum readiness. Protecting flows relies on identity, zero trust, and SASE, and assurance keeps rapid patches and segmentation changes from breaking the user experience. When asked about assurance, he acknowledged that it detects malicious activity rather than preventing it, but said it gives the SOC additional telemetry. On patching, Live Protect shields vulnerabilities until customers can upgrade. Ghodgaonkar added that engineering teams are removing unused code and disabling unneeded default features to reduce future CVE exposure. Khan’s conclusion was blunt: the network configurations that got organizations here won’t carry them into the post-AI world.