AI is reshaping how we course of knowledge, remedy advanced issues, and ship digital experiences. However your AI surroundings is simply as safe because the infrastructure it runs on—and attackers know precisely the place to search for weaknesses.
As you scale AI workloads nearer to finish customers, brokers, and machines, a vital problem emerges: you will need to maximize GPU and CPU utilization whereas additionally defending in opposition to refined, fast-moving threats.
Conventional safety fashions battle in these environments. Centralized firewall home equipment can turn into visitors choke factors that don’t scale to AI-level throughput. Host-based software program brokers can even tax CPU assets you want for AI processing—and, in some circumstances, introduce operational threat in multi-tenant environments.
To handle this, Cisco and NVIDIA are partnering to redefine AI safety. By extending Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall to NVIDIA BlueField knowledge processing models (DPUs), Cisco brings stateful segmentation straight into AI servers related to Cisco Nexus One AI front-end materials. The outcome is a sturdy, hardware-accelerated, server-level safety structure that helps cease threats earlier than they attain your knowledge—maximizing safety with no efficiency tradeoff.
With Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall, you possibly can outline coverage as soon as and implement it in every single place. This unified safety mannequin spans bodily and digital firewalls, cloud environments, and now the DPUs inside your AI servers.
The front-end community: The actual safety area
In AI infrastructure, an important safety boundary is the front-end community, the place customers submit inference and coaching requests, storage methods change datasets and checkpoints, and multi-tenant workloads typically share the identical servers. As a result of exterior visitors enters right here, it’s the zone the place inspection and isolation matter most.
Entrance-end visitors usually falls into two major flows:
- Consumer → Compute (inference and coaching)
- Compute ↔ Storage (knowledge ingest, dataset entry, checkpointing)
In AI environments, you possibly can’t assume solely “some” visitors wants inspection. Almost all of it does, and multi-tenancy calls for strict segmentation. That requires segmentation that may function at full line price throughout the front-end material.
Conventional centralized firewall home equipment break this mannequin. Hair-pinning visitors to an exterior firewall will increase latency and creates bandwidth bottlenecks, successfully a choke level for the complete cluster.
Bringing safety to the AI workload with DPUs
A greater mannequin is server-level enforcement utilizing DPUs. By working the firewall on an NVIDIA BlueField DPU—not the host CPU—you cut back the danger of tenant tampering and protect CPU/GPU cycles for AI workloads.
Cisco is redefining AI workload safety by implementing unified safety coverage utilizing Hybrid Mesh Firewall on AI servers with NVIDIA BlueField DPUs. This allows:
- Air-gapped enforcement in multi-tenant and bare-metal environments
- {Hardware}-accelerated 400G line-rate stateful segmentation in DPU
- VPC-aware coverage enforcement on the community edge
- Effective-grained observability per move in {hardware} at scale
- Lateral motion containmentserving to block east–west assaults on the server boundary
Cisco Nexus One simplifies how community coverage is constructed, deployed, and saved aligned with workload id and context.
On every AI server, it discovers Kubernetes workload metadata and shares that context with Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall, which interprets it into application-aware, stateful segmentation guidelines:
- Native discovery (Nexus One): A unified administration aircraft runs on every AI server to gather Kubernetes stock metadata—workload/software id, labels and annotations, namespaces, and so forth.
- Context-aware coverage (Hybrid Mesh Firewall): Makes use of the above metadata to generate application-aware, stateful segmentation insurance policies for every workload.
- DPU enforcement: Insurance policies are enforced inline on the NVIDIA BlueField DPU with out exterior brokers or software program.
- Kubernetes integrations: Optimized for the Isovalent Kubernetes suite (together with Cilium CNI and Hubble) and appropriate with customary Kubernetes environments.
“AI is remodeling each business, and the fast rise of AI factories is driving a rising want for cybersecurity at scale throughout enterprise infrastructure. By embedding Cisco’s Hybrid Mesh Firewall coverage into NVIDIA BlueField DPUs on AI servers, our joint prospects obtain high-performance, multi-tenant, intent-driven enforcement and hardware-accelerated safety, seamlessly related through Cisco Nexus One AI front-end materials.”
—Kevin Deierling, SVP of Networking, NVIDIA
Cisco Nexus One: Community coverage orchestration and visibility for AI front-end materials
Cisco Nexus One takes these capabilities additional by orchestrating advanced community insurance policies and sustaining end-to-end visibility with multisite implementations in AI front-end materials (as proven beneath). This simplifies operations, strengthens compliance enforcement, and offers a safety framework that scales as AI environments develop.
Constructing the safe AI manufacturing facility of the long run
AI factories succeed when safety retains tempo with AI-scale throughput. By working Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall on NVIDIA BlueField DPUs, we offer distributed, in-server enforcement with 400G line-rate stateful inspection and fine-grained, flow-level observability—with out consuming CPU and GPU assets.
Paired with Cisco Nexus One for centralized community coverage and visibility, organizations can scale multi-tenant AI infrastructure with confidence, safe from the within out.
Safety is the primary service delivered on the DPU. Subsequent, we’ll increase by including extra AI-centric community providers working on DPUs.
Roadmap highlights
- Managed Availability: Q3 CY26
- Basic Availability: This autumn CY26
What’s new
- Cisco Nexus One: Community coverage and visibility
- Hybrid Mesh Firewall: Stateful segmentation on BlueField DPUs
- Splunk: Safety observability integration
To attempt the answer throughout Managed Availability in early Q3 CY26, please contact your Cisco account consultant.
