The latest models, innovations, and possibilities dominate the enterprise AI conversation.
Yet, in terms of its practical application, there must be more room for discussion around governance, security, and data access.
Cisco and ServiceNow have pushed these crucial talking points to the fore by declaring a strengthened partnership.
In doing so, the vendors announced the combination of Cisco AI Defense and ServiceNow SecOps.
However, this isn't a run-of-the-mill integration; it's co-innovation, alongside a commitment by the two vendors to work more closely together.
Indeed, during an interview on Cisco’s YouTube channel, Amit Zavery, President, CPO, & COO at ServiceNow, teased ongoing co-innovation, deeper product integration, and real engineering collaboration, not just go-to-market fluff.
As such, expect more from the two tech giants, with considerable crossover, especially from a customer experience perspective.
Nevertheless, before considering what could come next, let’s first consider how its initial co-innovation endeavor will work and benefit mutual customers.
That starts with a quick rundown of the newly interoperable Cisco AI Defense and ServiceNow SecOps solutions.
What Is Cisco AI Defense?
Enterprises face two critical emerging security challenges as they get to grips with AI.
First, they must protect AI assets across the enterprise environment, ensuring employees don’t tamper or misuse them, knowingly or not.
Second, they need to prevent "shadow AI", which is the utilization of unapproved third-party generative AI (GenAI) applications.
Cisco AI Defense addresses these challenges by acting as a control system.
Indeed, it monitors internal AI assets, ensuring they're secure and alerting security and compliance teams to tampering and anomalies.
It also observes AI's use in the network to detect shadow AI activity.
What Is ServiceNow SecOps?
ServiceNow SecOps splits into two groups of apps, tools, and workflows.
The first set aims to anticipate and understand security incidents and vulnerabilities. The second set focuses on case management, informing quick responses to critical issues.
Still, many organizations monitor issues via spreadsheets and email, which makes crucial updates and reporting difficult.
With SecOps, businesses can establish an HQ for their security posture, utilizing visual dashboards to track problems and analytics to spot trends and response times.
Analytics also allows companies to determine the possible impact of vulnerabilities and incidents, prioritizing action and establishing ownership.
How Will the Co-Innovation Work?
The new partnership ties Cisco AI Defense and ServiceNow SecOps together in several ways.
First, Cisco AI Defense will map all the AI workloads, models, and data across the ServiceNow platform, including all its apps and services.
From there, it may perform automated vulnerability assessments. Findings will appear in SecOps’ Vulnerability Response app, where organizations can track issues, triage, and address them.
Meanwhile, Cisco AI Defense metrics will pass into SecOps' Security Incident Response app. The telemetry will provide insight into incidents, support their investigation, and facilitate a proactive threat response.
Additionally, the co-innovation will pull together two other key features of the products: Cisco AI Runtime Protection and ServiceNow Security Posture Control.