en.Wedoany.com Reported - Cisco's IQ platform has onboarded 1,700 customers within six weeks of its launch, with clients primarily using it to identify at-risk end-of-life devices. The AI-driven support and service delivery tool, which became generally available on April 24, is designed to complement Cisco's Cloud Control product; Cloud Control provides product support, while Cisco IQ offers service support, and the two are being integrated.
The primary use case driving early adoption is the identification of devices in enterprise and telecom infrastructure that have passed their end-of-life and end-of-vulnerability-support dates. Bhaskar Jayakrishnan, Senior Vice President of Customer Experience at Cisco Engineering, cited data from Cisco Talos' 2025 Annual Review, noting that 40% of the top 100 vulnerabilities exploited in 2025 existed on end-of-life devices. He also stated that the Salt Typhoon attack—a Chinese state-sponsored operation that breached multiple U.S. telecom operators—directly illustrates the issue, describing Salt Typhoon as an active persistent threat primarily based on end-of-life equipment.
Cisco IQ provides customers with a unified asset view by correlating purchase history, network telemetry, and configuration management database (CMDB) data, tagging devices based on support status, security advisory applicability, and cryptography posture. Asset reconciliation features, set to roll out in the coming months, aim to clean up chaotic enterprise data. A second major use case is security advisory visibility: Cisco IQ displays applicable security advisories, hardening rules, and best practices based on the customer's actual environment, aiming to close the feedback loop between the information observed in Cisco's 1.4 to 1.5 million annual support cases and the proactive warnings individual customers receive. Cisco IQ is available in three versions: a SaaS version, an isolated on-premises deployment for customers in highly regulated industries (launching in July), and a hybrid on-premises deployment that runs intelligent logic on-site while automatically pulling updates via a cloud connection.
Cisco also announced Resilient Infrastructure Services, a structured three-phase infrastructure hardening approach delivered through Cisco IQ. This service is designed to protect networks in the post-Mythos security environment; Cisco cited the AI model Mythos—known for its ability to identify and exploit software vulnerabilities—noting that it has compressed the time from vulnerability disclosure to active exploitation from months to minutes, reshaping the threat landscape. The three-phase approach includes: Phase 1, Exposure Assessment, covering attack surface, end-of-support devices, unpatched vulnerabilities, and security advisory status; Phase 2, Infrastructure Modernization, guiding customers toward automated patch pipelines, infrastructure-as-code practices, and zero-trust segmentation; and Phase 3, Defense Resilience, ensuring security operations centers leverage autonomous response capabilities. Jayakrishnan noted that the most challenging phase varies by customer, but two common friction points are the large volume of end-of-life devices requiring careful planning and the technical and operational complexity of implementing zero-trust principles, particularly micro-segmentation. The Resilient Infrastructure Playbook, covering Phase 1, is now available through Cisco IQ.
To help operators assess their own standing, Cisco also launched Peer Benchmarking, allowing customers to compare their infrastructure posture (end-of-support exposure, security advisory status, telemetry connectivity) against anonymized data from organizations of similar size, industry, and geography, addressing a long-standing blind spot in enterprise security and operations: organizations cannot reliably know whether they are outperforming or lagging behind their peers.
Cisco is also addressing the changing threat landscape driven by quantum technology. The Quantum Ready Assessments, launching in July, will evaluate the quantum readiness of Cisco infrastructure across three dimensions: Secure Communications, covering whether traffic uses encryption protocols resistant to quantum decryption; Secure Platforms, covering device hardening, including root of trust, encrypted images, and related protections; and Cryptographic Agility, covering the platform's ability to update encryption algorithms independently of the underlying system. The assessment maps each device to one of four outcomes: requires hardware refresh, requires software update, requires configuration change, or requires feature activation. The Quantum Ready Assessments allow organizations to select applicable global standards, as multiple countries and regions are adopting different post-quantum cryptography standards. Jayakrishnan stated that Indian financial regulators have done extensive work in quantum readiness education, and Indian customers have already requested assessments ahead of the July availability. The "harvest now, decrypt later" threat model is driving urgency, and Cisco committed at this week's conference that most of its core products will achieve quantum-safe communications by December 2026, announcing that all new enterprise and data center router, switch, and firewall families will be quantum-safe by default.
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