How Cisco's Cloud Control Launch Helps Validate Agentic Operations
Cisco's silos have been cracked open. Last week, as Cisco convened its annual Cisco Live event, the networking giant rolled out major product announcements, and executives discussed strategy with press and analysts.
Cisco Cloud Control was one of the more important launches of the event, showing that Cisco has gotten serious about embracing agentic infrastructure operations to provide better ease-of-use, integration, and management of its diverse operating systems and platforms.
As we wrote in 2024 (at last count that article had 44,000 page views), operating system balkanization and licensing headaches were drawing the most ire from Cisco customers. Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins and President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel vowed at Cisco Live 2024 to transform the company, and Cisco Live 2026 was evidence of that.
Cisco Cloud Control was one of last week's largest launches, and it presents compelling evidence that meaningful change has occurred. Cloud Control is a centralized, AI-driven interface that will be included with most Cisco platform licenses. It's designed to be the sole management interface going forward—a move that Patel said was difficult, because Cisco management needed full commitment from all product groups to migrate away from their product-specific management interfaces.
"Right now we want to be focused on delighting the user," said Patel at Cisco Live.
The launch also embraces AIOps on a deeper level. By integrating its own telemetry and data with custom AI models to drive insights and agentic orchestration, Cisco is moving toward agentic infrastructure with Cisco Cloud Control. It’s also validating the market for agentic orchestration, a trend we have outlined in our Tech Primer on agentic infrastructure operations.
"Cisco Cloud Control is a clear signal that agentic operations has moved from concept to commitment,” said Chris Wade, CTO of network operations company Itential. “We're watching the industry shift from chatbots to agents that accelerate engineering and operations.”
Itential is a Cisco partner and it launched its own agentic operations product, FlowAI, last week.
Controlling the Interface
Cisco Cloud Control and Cisco IQ aim to solve several problems at once: They are merging support and management tools into a single, AI-driven portal. Cisco Cloud Control is a front-end to managing nearly all Cisco infrastructure products, ranging from Nexus switches to Meraki campus products.
Cisco is also integrating its observability and telemetry assets, such as Splunk and Thousand Eyes, to drive agentic infrastructure operations using reasoning based on telemetry and historical data. As we described in the Tech Primer, using telemetry to drive reasoning and action is the next step in agentic operations.
As expressed by Patel, implementing Cisco Cloud Control was a management challenge. Patel said it wasn’t easy forcing many divisions to break down their silos. It required transmitting a new mindset across the organization: Everything in Cisco, including diverse operating platforms, must now be managed through Cisco Cloud Control.
According to Cisco executives, Cloud Control is the result of Cisco-specific customization of LLMs to learn from Cisco’s vast trove of infrastructure data. The Deep Network Model is based on 40 years of Cisco operational data. Operators can work with autonomous agents to spot trouble, identify causes, implement fixes, and test changes before deployment. Cisco says Cloud Control is powered by Cisco telemetry and purpose-built models.
Components of Cisco Cloud Control include Cisco AI Canvas and Cloud Control Studio. AI Canvas is described as a collaborative space for operators to work with agents to resolve complex issues. Cloud Control Studio allows customers to build agents for Cloud Control as well as to connect to third-party platforms.
What Does This Mean for the Ecosystem?
In speaking with practitioners and partners at the Cisco Live conference, the reception for Cloud Control was generally positive. But there will, of course, be questions about how it’s used in large hybrid environments, as well as what it means for adjacent products in the market.
Through Cloud Control Studio, Cisco plans to enable partners to add features and functionality. That will enable third-party companies to integrate with Cloud Control. But some participants might be leery of such an approach, as it embraces Cisco’s management plane.
What’s more likely is that Cloud Control will become a boon for Cisco-heavy networking shops, but independent network orchestration vendors have plenty of room to add value in agentic operations for hybrid and multi-vendor environments.
Itential's CTO Chris Wade was one of the first to predict this trend to me last year. Wade told me that the large networking vendors are likely to build advanced management platforms incorporating AI functionality, but the market will still demand multi-vendor solutions.
“Equipment vendors are vertically integrating to deliver a unified operational interface and APIs are giving way to MCP and skills for a step-function leap in value,” said Wade. “The challenge ahead is operationalizing these vendor agentic strategies, and enterprises will need to integrate and manage a growing set of multi-vendor agentic capabilities delivered by their suppliers. This is where the whole market is heading, and it's happening fast."
Selector AI is another leader in the networking automation and observability space, as well as a partner with Itential (both Itential and Selector are included in our Futuriom 50 list of innovative startups).
Selector’s Head of Marketing, Stephen Ochs, concurs with Wade, saying it’s likely Cisco will put most of its energy into supporting its own products. The market will still need solutions outside of the Cisco ecosystem.
“How far outside the Cisco ecosystem will Cloud Control go?” asked Ochs.
Ochs says Cisco's push boosts visiblity of the AIOps market. He said that Selector AI is growing fast, with the company on track to double business this year.
“We're in an interesting spot where we have to say no to some people,” said Ochs.
Staying Up-to-Date with Live Protect and Cisco IQ
One thing is clear from the Cisco Live launches: The AI arms race is going to benefit Cisco customers as the company pushes to keep up with a fast-moving market.
Another area of focus at Cisco Live was the impact that AI tools such as Anthropic’s Mythos are having on system management and security patching. Mythos showed that hackers could use AI tools to uncover millions of network vulnerabilities in minutes. To prevent bad actors from weaponizing the technology, Anthropic launched Project Glasswing. The coalition grants secure, early access to about 40 organizations and major tech companies to help them find and patch flaws before adversaries do. Cisco is a member of Glasswing.
Cisco’s Live Protect and Cisco IQ, launched a few weeks before the conference, are AI-enabled scanning products designed to ease the pain of network management and patching of security vulnerabilities.
Cisco says that “Live Protect acts as a digital immune system for Cisco products.” In simpler terms, it’s way to patch systems without actually having to patch them. Cisco IQ runs continuous, AI-driven assessments to surface vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, allowing IT teams to fix issues before they disrupt operations.
Patching systems in the classic sense, which often requires shutting down equipment, upgrading software, and rebooting, is no longer fast enough to keep up with the speed of threats in the post-Mythos world. Live Protect is a runtime capability embedded directly into Cisco’s NX-OS that allows administrators to apply Cisco-validated compensating controls to infrastructure between regular maintenance upgrades.
According to Cisco SVP Tom Gillis, this doesn’t obviate the need for full upgrades and patches, but it does provide a way to shield systems from vulnerabilities before equipment can be updated. Gillis said that Live Protect is a bridge solution that enables users to shield their systems from vulnerabilities in between full patching cycles.
"The old mode was validating, hardening, and deploying and trying to change as little as possible," said Gillis in a presentation. "We are going to be issuing urgent security updates. We have to bring cloud operating principles to infrastructure."
Now available in N9000 series switches and included with the Nexus One product, Live Protect is expanding to more products in the Cisco Portfolio in the coming months, starting with campus and branch smart switches, followed by secure routers later in the year.
I’m sure some people will have gripes, but last week’s Cisco Live presented a huge step forward for Cisco. As I wrote in 2024, Cisco risked alienating its customer base with its increasingly fragmented and non-integrated platforms, many of which were acquired through acquisitions. Tools such as Cisco Cloud Control and Live Protect show Cisco is serious about breaking down its famed silos and delivering a more integrated, user-friendly experience for its customers.
