Secure Routing for AI with Cisco Enterprise Networking

Secure Routing with Cisco Enterprise Networking tackles the increasing complexity, user experience demands, and security requirements of modern WAN networks, especially with the advent of AI branches. Rahul Sagi introduced Cisco Secure Routers, launching in 2025, designed to converge Cisco’s best-in-class networking with advanced security in a single product. This convergence is enabled by a new Secure Networking Processor (SNP) that delivers the high throughput and capacity essential for future AI applications. These routers offer comprehensive on-box security capabilities, including a full stack of hybrid mesh firewalls with IPS/IDS, URL filtering, and AMP Threat Grid, while also supporting cloud security options for direct Internet access (DIA) use cases.

The Secure Networking Processor, an ARM-based chip with Cisco IP, is central to these innovations, enabling inline cryptographic acceleration and a natively integrated Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) stack for superior performance. Cisco highlights significant improvements, including up to three times the IPsec performance and high security efficacy, with threat protection throughput reaching up to 11 Gbps even with all security features enabled. Addressing the impending threat of quantum computing, the new portfolio integrates Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) algorithms, specifically ML-CEM for key exchanges in WAN transport (IPsec and MACsec) and quantum-resistant secure boot, ensuring networks are future-proofed against quantum attacks by 2030, a critical concern for sectors like public, healthcare, retail, and finance. The secure routers also boast improved power efficiency and increased WAN interface capacities, supporting up to 100 Gbps, to handle the escalating I/O demands of AI-driven environments. Furthermore, some platforms include a dedicated AI/ML engine for local inferencing to enhance network performance in future software releases, and native zero-trust principles are embedded throughout the system.

Beyond hardware, Cisco is leveraging AI to simplify WAN operations, offering “AI for networking” tools for administrators. This includes “Branch as Code” with Cisco Validated Designs and integration into CI/CD pipelines for automated, scalable deployments across hundreds of sites. The AI Assistant in management solutions such as Catalyst SD-WAN Manager and the Meraki dashboard streamlines configuration and troubleshooting. Specific AI-powered features include Predictive Path Recommendations, which analyze historical network behavior to suggest optimal transport paths for applications at specific times, and Bandwidth Forecasting, which helps predict and plan for circuit upgrades. Anomaly Detection continuously monitors network attributes such as round-trip time, jitter, and loss to proactively alert administrators to anomalous behavior, reducing troubleshooting time. These combined efforts aim to deliver AI-ready networking products, simplify WAN operations with intelligent tools, and reduce risk across all layers with robust, future-proof security controls.