Hypershield: the new shape of cybersecurity

Cisco Hypershield has been described as a groundbreaking security architecture designed to defend modern, AI-scale data centres. What does it mean for the enterprise in the cloud?

I asked NABEEL RAJAB, technical solutions architect for Cisco in South Africa, to tell us why Cybersecurity has become so critical in cloud computing, and to dive deeper into the role of Hypershield in protecting data in every layer.

Watch the full interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnsvOHT7Ky4

Here are some of the key questions and answer:

Arthur Goldstuck: Give us a sense of why Cybersecurity has become so critical in cloud computing.

Nabeel Rajab:  Today, everything’s built on the cloud, if you think about it, it’s such a key component of how we deliver services and tools, applications to users, whether those are public users, or even internal to specific organisations. 

It’s given us that ability to be able to reach people and reach users where we couldn’t reach them before, for one. And on top of that, it allows us to do that rapidly at scale. When we think about these aspects of cloud, of cloud delivery, of cloud computing, we really have … to understand how to protect these types of workloads, how to protect those types of environments. 

It’s very, very difficult to be able to keep up with this environment because of the scale of it and because of the rapidly moving nature of these types of environments. 

AG: How does Hypershield address this challenge?

NR: Hypershield is probably one of our most fascinating solutions or products that’s come out in in terms of the cybersecurity space within Cisco for our entire history, because it’s really a fundamental shift in how we were approaching cybersecurity in the cloud and for modern use cases. The one area that’s really exploding, as everyone would know, is in terms of AI and machine learning, and all the tools and applications that are coming out of this. 

When you couple the change in this area and the fast-paced adoption of these types of tools and services, with cloud and the challenges that are coming out of securing cloud spaces and cloud environments, it really becomes an exponential challenge.

What Hypershield is attempting to do is to automate a lot of the security that’s required in that space, but also understand and have deeper insights into these areas without needing too much human intervention. Humans just can’t operate at machine speed, the way we can do with things like AI and with automation. And that’s what we’re trying to do with Hypershield.

For the rest of the interview, and to understand how Hypershield can help prepare for the future, watch the interview here.