Cisco AI Defense embeds with ServiceNow SecOps tools

Two enterprise IT heavyweights will broaden their partnership to link AI security with enterprise SecOps tools.

Cisco AI Defense, a tool for securing enterprise AI workloads, launched in January, will tie in with multiple parts of ServiceNow's SecOps portfolio:

• Cisco AI Defense will discover AI assets, including workloads, models and data, and correlate them with applications in ServiceNow's Now platform.
• Cisco AI Defense will send vulnerability assessment findings to ServiceNow's Vulnerability Response.
• Cisco AI Defense will send AI application telemetry to ServiceNow's Security Incident Response.
• Customers can tie Cisco AI Defense controls to ServiceNow's Integrated Risk Management standards for IT compliance.
• ServiceNow's Security Posture Control will identify AI workloads not covered by Cisco AI Defense runtime protection.

The combination reflects the fact that cybersecurity is now "board-level stuff" for enterprise companies, which increasingly want to work with fewer, bigger technology vendors and comprehensive platforms, including for AI security, said Fernando Montenegro, an analyst at The Futurum Group.

A CEO is not asking, 'Do I choose security vendor one or security vendor two?' They are asking, 'Who is my technology partner?'

"We are now at the stage where buyers want to de-risk their cybersecurity purchases and look to broader vendors [such as] Microsoft, Google, Palo Alto, Cisco, Fortinet, CrowdStrike and others," Montenegro said. "Just as people make this kind of decision around security, they make this kind of decision around technology more broadly -- a CEO is not asking, 'Do I choose security vendor one or security vendor two?' They are asking, 'Who is my technology partner?'"

Cisco and ServiceNow have more than cybersecurity tools in their product lines, and the integration shores up areas where they're not as dominant as in some markets. For example, Cisco owns over three-quarters of the network infrastructure market by some estimates, but faces intense competition in incident response from other big vendors such as IBM and Palo Alto Networks. ServiceNow has a longstanding lead in the IT service management market, but isn't quite as influential in security tools, where Gartner ranked Microsoft, Gen Digital and CrowdStrike as top vendors in 2024.

ServiceNow acquired Moveworks for its agentic AI expertise in March, but Cisco has been more vocal about AI security, according to Andy Thurai, an independent analyst at The Field CTO. Palo Alto Networks and IBM also offer AI security products, as do observability and security vendors such as Dynatrace and Coralogix.

Andy Thurai

ServiceNow's Moveworks purchase pushed it into fiercer competition for AI agents, and the Cisco partnership enables it to catch up quickly with security for AI agents, he said.

"ServiceNow is trying to transition overnight into a big agentic AI company," Thurai said. "Cisco's security-related tools around AI are much further along."

Security and governance are key to staying competitive in the enterprise AI race, Montenegro said.

"In our research, governance and trust appears as one of the major concerns with AI [among enterprises]," he said. "Governance and trust for these vendor platforms are two of the things that differentiate them from somebody doing things themselves, so it makes sense for these enterprise AI vendors to lean in to security more heavily."

However, as Cisco and partners roll out a new open source cybersecurity large language model (LLM), some security experts are uncertain how well AI agent workload automation will scale long-term.

"If we calculate the power necessary to address [the] volume [of security alerts the average enterprise security operations center receives] with generative AI, we quickly begin approaching the power needs of a supercomputer and costs that exceed the entire security budget, much less the budget of just the SOC," said Adrian Sanabria, an independent security consultant.

"If there's some magic trick they've figured out to make [LLMs] orders of magnitude more efficient, [that would] change," he said. "There are dozens of companies competing here, [such as] 7AI, Dropzone, Bricklayer, Amplifier, Prophet Security, Reach, Radiant, Command Zero, Louie AI, System Two Security, Tenex [and] Simbian."

Beth Pariseau, a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism covering DevOps. Have a tip? Email her or reach out @PariseauTT.