en.Wedoany.com Reported - Cisco plans to acquire cybersecurity company WideField Security to expand its AI agent security foundation. Upon completion of the transaction, WideField's technology will be integrated into Cisco's Splunk suite to enhance the capabilities of the Agent Security Operations Center (SOC).
Kamal Hathi, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Splunk, introduced the acquisition in a blog post, noting that WideField can standardize and correlate identity, session, and activity telemetry data from multiple sources. With these capabilities, Splunk users will be able to integrate contextual information spanning human, machine, and AI agent activities. Hathi stated that the rapid deployment of AI agents, machine identities, and autonomous workloads introduces new categories of security risks, requiring new methods to ensure operational guardrails for agents to prevent malicious manipulation, keep automated behaviors within compliance boundaries, and detect and respond to threats at machine speed and scale.
Hathi emphasized the need to establish deterministic data pipelines to correlate telemetry from endpoints, identity systems, networks, and clouds in a format optimized for AI consumption. "Splunk's Agent SOC will be able to assemble the session-level signals needed by security analysts for deep analysis, enabling these agents to infer whether an operation belongs to a legitimate activity session or a potentially malicious one." Additionally, WideField's technology will enhance Cisco Data Fabric by integrating deeper identity and session intelligence, providing customers with the context needed to securely run AI at scale.
Founded in 2023 and headquartered in San Francisco, WideField focuses on identity security in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud, and on-premises environments. The company's CEO and co-founder, Abhay Kulkarni, previously served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco's Webex division. In March, WideField completed a Series A funding round, raising over $11 million from investors including Cisco Investments.
Through integration with Splunk, WideField's identity services will work in conjunction with Galileo Technologies, which Cisco recently acquired. The deal closed in May, and Galileo brings real-time visibility and protection for the complete agent development lifecycle to Splunk, safeguarding agent AI and ensuring the accuracy and transparency of network systems. To further enhance security capabilities in the AI era, Cisco also acquired Astrix Security and embedded it into Cisco Identity Intelligence. Similar to WideField, Astrix focuses on non-human identities (NHIs) to discover and manage AI agent capabilities, mapping an organization's agent activities against established security policies for inspection.
At Cisco Live this month, SDxCentral spoke with Jeff Schultz, Senior Vice President of Portfolio Strategy at Cisco, who emphasized that Cisco believes "security and networking in the future should not be separate practices." To this end, Cisco launched a cloud-based centralized control point called Cisco Cloud Control, allowing customers to manage and protect infrastructure assets across its growing portfolio of products and services. This portal provides a single sign-on and management plane for networking, security, observability, computing, and collaboration products. This unification is built on top of Cisco Data Fabric, powered by the Splunk suite as a unified data layer. Cisco Cloud Control also features an Agent Builder for creating AI agents and connecting to third-party tools, as well as Agentic Actions for the networking suite, serving as a root cause analysis and closed-loop remediation hub for deployed networks.
This article is compiled by Wedoany. All AI citations must indicate the source as "Wedoany". If there is any infringement or other issues, please notify us promptly, and we will modify or delete it accordingly. Email: news@wedoany.com
