Cisco Debuts Cloud Control for Agentic IT Operations

Cisco today unveiled Cisco Cloud Control, a new unified platform built for humans and AI agents to manage, monitor, and defend critical IT infrastructure.

This platform is fully extensible, with more than 40 ecosystem tooling connectors, and fully customizable, enabling the creation of custom applications and agents using natural language directly within the platform.

Cisco Cloud Control unifies Cisco’s portfolio, which spans over 40 third-party tools, including AWS, Google, Microsoft, and ServiceNow.

Further, the platform advances Cisco’s AgenticOps vision, an operating model that transitions complex IT and security workflows from manual, human-led processes to a new era of autonomous, agent-driven orchestration.

Cloud Control Studio adds agent and app builders

Cisco Cloud Control offers a single management plane that brings Cisco products across networking, security, compute, observability, and collaboration into one environment, with a single login and a single view.

Cisco Data Fabric, powered by the Splunk Platform, underpins the platform as its unified data. Meanwhile, Cloud Control Studio serves as a design space where customers and partners can build, secure, and share the applications, workflows, and agents their business depends on.

Cloud Control Studio unlocks two customization environments:

• Agent Builder: Where customers and partners can build agents tailored to their own policies and workflows, connecting them to third-party tools, including AWS, Google, Linear, Microsoft, ServiceNow, PagerDuty, and Wiz through native connectors or the open Model Context Protocol (MCP).
• App Builder: Allows users to build and publish from natural-language prompts, with built-in agentic coding assistants, including OpenAI Codex.

What is built in the Cloud Control Studio lives within the Cloud Control Marketplace, an open catalog where customers and partners can discover, share, and extend what’s possible.

“We’re seeing as people move from chatbots to agents, is that you’re going to start to see this fundamental shift in how people expect us to start to operate,” said DJ Sampath, SVP and GM of Cisco’s AI Software and Platform group. “If you’re going to start using agents to be able to perform these operations, you’re going to see a whole new operating model that starts to emerge that allows us to help our customers dramatically simplify their operations.”

AI Canvas supports human and agent collaboration

The Cisco AI Canvas workspace operates within Cisco Cloud Control as the multiplayer, generative environment where human operators and AI agents investigate, correlate, and resolve complex issues together in real time.

Operators can see the same live evidence as agents, and agents build investigation plans, pull data across domains, and drive resolution end-to-end.

“There’s no doubt that the AI revolution is absolutely upon us and it’s also driving a new understanding, or new recognition, of just the criticality of digital infrastructure,” said Ben Dawson, President of Sales, APJC, Cisco. 

“We know getting digital infrastructure right is going to be an important enabler and getting it wrong is going to be a real handbrake on economic activity and the success of business.”

Cisco expands infrastructure resilience and AI security

Cisco Cloud Control serves as a security command center for protecting critical infrastructure.

It provides proactive risk management through new Resilient Infrastructure Services that help customers stay ahead of frontier-model threats through a three-step approach: assess exposure, modernize infrastructure, and build defense resilience.

It is powered by AI-driven insights and zero trust principles. The new capability in Cisco IQ allows customers to combat frontier-model threats.

Live Protect and Agentic SOC target emerging threats

Cisco is expanding Live Protect across its product portfolio, starting with Nexus. Live Protect is a digital immune system for Cisco products that shields them from newly discovered and prioritized vulnerabilities at runtime, with no reboots, upgrades, or maintenance windows. 

Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall also extends unified protection across networks and applications, along with Cisco and third-party firewalls, to limit the blast radius of cyber threats.

Further, Cisco is providing agent-related protection for systems, exchanging data, and initiating workflows inside enterprises:

• DefenseClaw provides security and governance for local agents such as OpenClaw, OpenAI Codex, and Claude Code. It scans for vulnerabilities, enforces access controls, and detects threats at runtime, with integrations into Splunk and Cisco AI Defense for unified observability and industry-leading guardrails for agents across endpoints.
• Cisco is extending Zero Trust Access to restrict agents to safe, predefined actions.
• Agentic SOC puts AI agents to work analyzing every alert and anomaly at machine speed, cutting fatigue while keeping human teams in the loop. Through Agent Observability, Cisco’s planned integration of Galileo into Splunk Observability enables enterprises to evaluate, observe, and secure agents across their full lifecycle, minimizing harmful outputs and controlling costs.

“Cisco Cloud Control has allowed us to focus less on navigating management platforms and more on the infrastructure we support,” said Mark Rodrigue, Senior Network Engineer, Room & Board. “A single platform makes us more efficient, gives us a centralized view of our entire environment, and helps us quickly identify areas that need attention.”