AI is reshaping how we course of knowledge, resolve complicated issues, and ship digital experiences. However your AI atmosphere is barely 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 important problem emerges: you need to maximize GPU and CPU utilization whereas additionally defending in opposition to subtle, fast-moving threats.
Conventional safety fashions wrestle in these environments. Centralized firewall home equipment can develop into site visitors choke factors that don’t scale to AI-level throughput. Host-based software program brokers may also tax CPU sources you want for AI processing—and, in some instances, introduce operational threat in multi-tenant environments.
To deal with 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 end result is a strong, 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 may outline coverage as soon as and implement it all over the 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 alternate datasets and checkpoints, and multi-tenant workloads usually share the identical servers. As a result of exterior site visitors enters right here, it’s the zone the place inspection and isolation matter most.
Entrance-end site visitors usually falls into two main flows:
Person → Compute (inference and coaching)
Compute ↔ Storage (knowledge ingest, dataset entry, checkpointing)
In AI environments, you may’t assume solely “some” site visitors wants inspection. Practically all of it does, and multi-tenancy calls for strict segmentation. That requires segmentation that may function at full line fee throughout the front-end material.
Conventional centralized firewall home equipment break this mannequin. Hair-pinning site visitors to an exterior firewall will increase latency and creates bandwidth bottlenecks, successfully a choke level for the whole cluster.
Bringing safety to the AI workload with DPUs
A greater mannequin is server-level enforcement utilizing DPUs. By operating 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
Advantageous-grained observability per movement in {hardware} at scale
Lateral motion containment, serving to block east–west assaults on the server boundary
Cisco Nexus One simplifies how community coverage is constructed, deployed, and stored aligned with workload identification 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/utility identification, labels and annotations, namespaces, and many others.
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 commonplace Kubernetes environments.
“AI is remodeling each trade, and the speedy 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 clients 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 complicated community insurance policies and sustaining end-to-end visibility with multisite implementations in AI front-end materials (as proven under). This simplifies operations, strengthens compliance enforcement, and gives a safety framework that scales as AI environments develop.
Constructing the safe AI manufacturing unit of the long run
AI factories succeed when safety retains tempo with AI-scale throughput. By operating 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 sources.
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 develop by including extra AI-centric community providers operating on DPUs.
Roadmap highlights
Managed Availability: Q3 CY26
Common 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 strive the answer throughout Managed Availability in early Q3 CY26, please contact your Cisco account consultant.
