Tech News

Cisco Reimagines Security for Data Centers and Clouds in Era of AI

Published

1 year ago

April 18, 2024

News Summary:
Cisco powers and secures AI-scale data centers and clouds, safeguarding every application and device regardless of distribution or connectivity.

In today’s highly distributed landscape, the window from vulnerability to exploitation is shrinking rapidly.
Defending against this complex threat environment is beyond human scale.
Cisco Hypershield enables customers to deploy security wherever needed: in the cloud, data center, factory floor, or hospital imaging room.
With AI-native security, customers can autonomously segment networks, enjoy distributed and instant exploit protection without patches, and experience self-qualifying software upgrades with zero downtime.

News in Detail:
Cisco, the leader in security and networking, today unveiled a radically new approach to securing data centers and clouds in response to the increasing demands the AI revolution has put on IT infrastructure. Cisco is rearchitecting how we harness and protect AI and other modern workloads with industry-first, Cisco Hypershield. With this unprecedented innovation, Cisco is tipping the scales in favor of defenders, building on its recent announcements to accelerate AI infrastructure with Cisco’s ethernet switching, silicon and compute portfolio.

Cisco Hypershield protects applications, devices and data across public and private data centers, clouds and physical locations – anywhere customers need it. Designed and built with AI in mind from the start, Hypershield enables organizations to achieve security outcomes beyond what has been possible with humans alone.

“Cisco Hypershield is one of the most significant security innovations in our history,” said Chuck Robbins, Cisco Chair and CEO. “With our data advantage and strength in security, infrastructure and observability platforms, Cisco is uniquely positioned to help our customers harness the power of AI.”

Hypershield is a revolutionary new security architecture. It’s built with technology originally developed for hyperscale public clouds and is now available for enterprise IT teams of all sizes. More a fabric than a fence, Hypershield enables security enforcement to be placed everywhere it needs to be. Every application service in the datacenter. Every Kubernetes cluster in the public cloud. Every container and virtual machine (VM). It can even turn every network port into a high-performance security enforcement point, bringing completely new security capabilities not just to clouds, but to the data center, on a factory floor, or a hospital imaging room. This new technology blocks application exploits in minutes and stops lateral movement in its tracks.

“AI has the potential to empower the world’s 8 billion people to have the same impact as 80 billion. With this abundance, we must reimagine the role of the data center – how data centers are connected, secured, operated and scaled,” said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager for Security and Collaboration at Cisco.

“The power of Cisco Hypershield is that it can put security anywhere you need it – in software, in a server, or in the future even in a network switch. When you have a distributed system that could include hundreds of thousands of enforcement points, simplified management is mission critical. And we need to be orders-of-magnitude more autonomous, at an orders-of-magnitude lower cost.”

Security enforcement with Hypershield happens at three different layers: in software, in virtual machines, and in network and compute servers and appliances, leveraging the same powerful hardware accelerators that are used extensively in high-performance computing and hyperscale public clouds.

Hypershield was built on three key pillars:

• AI-Native: Built and designed from the start to be autonomous and predictive, Hypershield manages itself once it earns trust, making a hyper-distributed approach at scale possible.
• Cloud-Native: Hypershield is built on open source eBPF, the default mechanism for connecting and protecting cloud-native workloads in the hyperscale cloud. Cisco acquired the leading provider of eBPF for enterprises, Isovalent, earlier this month.
• Hyper-Distributed: Cisco is completely reimagining how traditional network security works by embedding advanced security controls into servers and the network fabric itself. Hypershield spans all clouds and leverages hardware acceleration like Data Processing Units (DPU) to analyze and respond to anomalies in application and network behavior. It shifts security closer to the workloads that need protection.

Cisco, with its industry-leading expertise in networking, security and extensive partner ecosystem, together with NVIDIA, is committed to building and optimizing AI-native security solutions to protect and scale the data centers of tomorrow. This collaboration includes leveraging the NVIDIA Morpheus cybersecurity AI framework for accelerated network anomaly detection, as well as NVIDIA NIM microservices for powering custom security AI assistants for the enterprise. NVIDIA’s class of converged accelerators combine the power of GPU and DPU computing, to augment Cisco Hypershield with robust security from cloud to edge.

“Enterprises across all industries are seeking the security that can protect them against ever expanding cyber threats,” said Kevin Deierling, Senior Vice President of Networking at NVIDIA. “Together, Cisco and NVIDIA are leveraging the power of AI to deliver powerful, incredibly secure data center infrastructure that will enable enterprises to transform their businesses and benefit customers everywhere.”

As a revolutionary new security architecture, Hypershield is solving three key customer challenges in defending against today’s sophisticated threat landscape:

• Distributed Exploit Protection: Attackers are adept at weaponizing newly published vulnerabilities faster than defenders can patch. With defenders seeing nearly 100 new vulnerabilities every day, according to Cisco Talos Threat Intelligence, this can lead to catastrophic results. Hypershield delivers protection in minutes by automatically testing and deploying compensating controls into the distributed fabric of enforcement points.
• Autonomous Segmentation: Once an attacker is in the network, segmentation is key to stopping their lateral movement. Hypershield perpetually observes, auto-reasons and re-evaluates existing policies to autonomously segment the network, solving this in large and complex environments.
• Self-qualifying Upgrades: Hypershield automates the incredibly laborious and time-consuming process of testing and deploying upgrades once they are ready, leveraging a dual data plane. This completely new software architecture allows software upgrades and policy changes to be placed in a digital twin that tests updates using the customer’s unique combination of traffic, policies and features, then applying those updates with zero downtime.

Built into the Security Cloud, Cisco’s unified, AI-driven, cross-domain security platform, Cisco Hypershield is expected to be Generally Available in August 2024. With Cisco’s recent acquisition of Splunk, customers will gain unparalleled visibility and insights across their entire digital footprint for unprecedented security protection.

“AI is not just a force for good but also a tool used for nefarious purposes, allowing hackers to reverse engineer patches and create exploits in record time. Cisco looks to address an AI enabled problem with an AI solution as Cisco Hypershield aims to tip the scales back in favor of the defender by shielding new vulnerabilities against exploit in minutes – rather than the days, weeks or even months as we wait for patches to actually get deployed,” said Frank Dickson, Group Vice President, Security & Trust at IDC. “With the number of vulnerabilities ever increasing and the time for attackers to exploit them at scale ever decreasing, it’s clear that patching alone can’t keep up. Tools like Hypershield are necessary to combat an increasingly clever malicious cyber adversary.”

“Cisco Hypershield takes aim at the complex security challenges of modern, AI-scale data centers. Cisco’s vision of a self-managing fabric that seamlessly integrates from the network to the endpoint will help redefine what’s possible for security at scale,” said Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst of ZK Research. “For instance, this level of visibility and control across a hyper-distributed environment prevents lateral movement of attackers, enabled through a unique approach to segmentation that’s autonomous and highly effective. While this may seem fantastical, the time is right given recent AI advances combined with the maturity of cloud-native technologies like eBPF.”

“At AHEAD we believe cybersecurity should be integrated into everything we do. Bolted-on security is more expensive and less effective,” said Steven Aiello, Field Chief Information Security Officer at AHEAD. “Cisco Hypershield ensures that cyber protections are included into the fabric of the enterprise. Distributed Exploit Protection will be a massive win for blue teams – legacy synthetic patching was primarily limited to edge devices, allowing lateral movement once an attacker breached the perimeter. It’s a great day for cyber-defenders!”

Tech News

Nothing Raises $200M Series C to Power the Next Phase of Consumer AI

Published

1 day ago

September 19, 2025

Integrator Web-Admin

Today, we’re announcing new funding––USD $200M in our Series C round at a USD $1.3B valuation. This milestone marks the start of our next phase: From being the only independent smartphone company to emerge in the last decade, towards building an AI-native platform in which hardware and software converge into a single intelligent system.

a portrait of Carl Pei, CEO and Co-founder of Nothing — Carl Pei, CEO and Co-founder of Nothing

Building the foundations for the future
When we started Nothing, we had a thesis that if we could build a smartphone business at scale and own the last-mile distribution point in consumer tech, we would be well-positioned for the next technology shift. Although we didn’t know what that would look like at the time, the opportunity is now crystal clear.

From the start, we knew that the foundation had to be an end-to-end value chain
capable of delivering products at speed, scale, and quality. As we’ve seen from many others that have tried, building a hardware company is hard. There are many potential failure points and almost no room for error. For us, it required assembling a team that balanced a pragmatic approach of rapidly launching products, with an innovative mindset to deliver experiences that our community would immediately love.

Today, the foundations are firmly in place. From award-winning design, to our global manufacturing and supply chain network built for quality and cost. In four years, we have shipped millions of devices, began 2025 crossing $1B+ in total sales, while growing 150% in 2024.

Building this infrastructure has been the hardest and most valuable thing we’ve done so far. With the support of our community, we’re fortunate to have made it here. Today, we’re in a position that will be very hard to copy: The ability to launch any consumer hardware product from start to finish within months, go-to-market operations that can ship and service worldwide, a global user community that co-creates with us, all without the innovator’s dilemma or bureaucratic constraints that the incumbents face. On to chapter 2.

Operating systems, evolved
In the last 18 years, the smartphone became ubiquitous. It is the primary personal computing tool to manage the countless tasks of daily life. Beyond its distribution scale, what makes the smartphone the most powerful consumer device in the market is its unmatched access to contextual information and user knowledge. For this reason, I believe the smartphone will remain one of the most important devices in the AI era.

On the other hand, while AI has made revolutionary progress in the last three years, the smartphone experience has barely evolved. Most of the innovation has been underwhelming, limited to incremental improvements in photo editing, translations, and assistant features that barely work.

For AI to reach its full potential, consumer hardware must reinvent itself alongside it. This is the opportunity we see for Nothing. We see a future where operating systems are significantly different from the ones today. Each system will know its user deeply, and be hyper-personalised to each individual. Interfaces will adapt to our context and needs. Suggestions will surface naturally, and once we confirm an intent, agents will execute on our behalf. The system will handle the non-essential for us, allowing us to focus on what truly matters, which will be different for every person. Unlike today’s one-size-fits-all solution, a billion different operating systems will be rendered for a billion different people.

Over time, this OS will be transversal across all form factors: We’re starting with smartphones, audio products and smart watches, devices that people already use every day. In the future, our OS will carry into smart glasses, humanoid robots, EVs, and whatever comes next.

Why we are uniquely-positioned to create this future: Owning the last-mile distribution point with all its contextual and user knowledge is essential to developing an OS that will help people in their daily lives. An AI OS that doesn’t know its user and isn’t ever-present can’t deliver a hyper-personalised experience. This is the next chapter for Nothing, integrating an AI experience into our hardware devices to reinvent how technology amplifies us.

The next billion unit scale product
In the near-term, we believe that the smartphone will remain the only device shipping at billion-unit scale each year. But soon, we’ll all be carrying an additional device that will be just as important. In the coming years, we’ll learn that the more context we can feed our AI, the more useful it becomes. The smartphone, while powerful, can’t always be there for us. Sometimes it’s in our pocket, or we might be on the move with our hands full.

A new class of AI-native devices will emerge. Products that are available to the user at the moment of need, paired with intelligence that turns understanding into action. This is a very exciting time, imagining devices that capture context across modalities and generate interfaces on demand, shaped by what the user is trying to accomplish.

We have been hard at work imagining what this future could look like, and can’t wait to launch some of our first AI-native devices next year.

Our Series C capital raise
This funding round allows us to execute on this vision by accelerating our innovation roadmap and further scaling our distribution. Our round was led by Tiger Global, with significant support from existing shareholders GV, Highland Europe, EQT, Latitude, I2BF, and Tapestry, alongside new strategic backing from Nikhil Kamath and Qualcomm Ventures.

Alongside this Series C, we’re also preparing to launch our next Community round giving our supporters another opportunity to become part of Nothing’s journey. More details will be shared soon.

As we continue our journey, we do so with huge gratitude to our community, our team, and our partners. This next chapter is only possible because of you.

Carl, CEO and Co-founder of Nothing

Tech News

Innovo and Siemens Announce Strategic Partnership in Building Technologies

Published

4 days ago

September 16, 2025

Integrator Web-Editor

Two executives from Innovo and Siemens shake hands during a strategic partnership agreement signing ceremony in Dubai.

Innovo, an industry leader in construction and innovation, has signed a strategic partnership with Siemens, a leading technology company, to drive innovation, digital transformation, and sustainable growth across building technologies in the UAE.

Under the agreement, Innovo Technology Services has officially become a Siemens Solution Partner for Building Automation, authorised to deliver and integrate the Building X portfolio in the UAE. Building X is Siemens’ open, cloud-based platform for smart building management.

Innovo will provide full sales, integration, and support across modules including Lifecycle Twin, Energy Manager, Operations Manager, Comfort AI, Security Manager, Fire Manager, and API Manager.

This milestone strengthens Innovo’s commitment to digital adoption and sustainability in the built environment, while extending Siemens’ global leadership into one of the world’s fastest-growing construction markets.

The strategic partnership was formalised at a signing ceremony attended by Bishoy Azmy, CEO, Innovo, and Hakan Ozdemir, CEO, Smart Infrastructure, Siemens Middle East.

Bishoy Azmy, CEO, Innovo, said: “Our partnership with Siemens reflects our shared vision, to create smarter, safer, and more sustainable digital ecosystems. By combining Siemens’ advanced solutions with Innovo’s digital innovation, we are delivering intelligent solutions that will transform building performance and enhance quality delivery across the UAE.”

Hakan Ozdemir, CEO, Smart Infrastructure, Siemens Middle East, said: “Innovo is a trusted partner with a proven record in digital solutions. Their appointment as a Siemens Solution Partner will accelerate the deployment of our Building X portfolio in the UAE, supporting more efficient, resilient, and connected communities.”

Innovo continues to operate at the forefront of innovation. This strategic partnership supports the company’s vision to be part of the future of intelligent, sustainable building solutions that transform communities across its global markets.

Tech News

Lexar MEA expansion: 5,000+ retail stores

Published

2 weeks ago

September 9, 2025

Integrator Web-Editor

Lexar MEA expansion has hit a major milestone: the brand’s products are now available in over 5,000 retail stores across the Middle East and Africa. Moreover, the footprint reflects a fivefold increase in outlets carrying Lexar-branded solutions. With GITEX Global 2025 approaching, Lexar will showcase its latest memory and storage innovations for photographers, gamers, and content creators.

Lexar MEA expansion: momentum built with partners

At the core, growth comes from “The Lexar Way.” Specifically, the company co-builds the channel through training, consumer engagement, and incentive programs—so partners can move faster and serve customers better. Consequently, retailers gain the resources and product knowledge to match users with the right cards, readers, SSDs, and DRAM. In turn, this partner-first model has underpinned demand over the past three years.

“For nearly 30 years, Lexar has been empowering the world with memory innovations,” said Fissal Oubida, General Manager – Middle East, Africa & India. “Ultimately, our rapid growth in the region reflects rising demand for reliable memory solutions and the strength of our retail partnerships. Therefore, expanding our footprint demonstrates a long-term commitment to a market that’s become a hub for imaging innovation and creativity.”

Lexar MEA expansion at GITEX: what creators and gamers will see

At GITEX Global 2025 (Hall 1, Stand H1-25), Lexar plans to spotlight professional-grade memory cards, high-speed card readers, portable SSDs, and performance DRAM—solutions tuned for regional workflows. For creators, that means faster offloads, smoother edits, and simpler backup routines. For gamers, it means quicker load times and more responsive systems with NVMe upgrades and reliable storage tiers. Additionally, visitors can expect hands-on demos and guidance on selecting media for mirrorless bodies, cinema cameras, and gaming rigs. Notably, the team will translate specs into practical choices for real-world use.

Partner enablement that scales across MEA

To keep pace with demand, Lexar runs channel seminars and roadshows across the region. During these sessions, product details become clear use cases—from 4K/8K capture on CFexpress to hybrid creator–gamer setups. Furthermore, the company invests in localized education so floor staff can explain speed classes, endurance ratings, thermal behavior, and backup best practices. As a result, customers leave with the right media for their device and workload.

“Going forward, Lexar will continue to consolidate its regional presence,” added Oubida. “In fact, GITEX is an ideal platform to extend collaborations, strengthen local partnerships, and introduce new offerings tailored to MEA consumers.”

Why the Lexar MEA expansion footprint matters for end users

Availability matters. Because the retail network is broader, buyers can compare products in person, ask questions, and walk out with the right kit the same day. Moreover, consistent access improves creator and gamer confidence—especially when tight deadlines depend on fast cards and dependable SSDs. In practical terms, the 5,000-store milestone shortens the path from idea to delivery. Likewise, it supports regional growth in content creation, esports, and professional imaging.

Looking ahead

Expect continued product rollouts and deeper collaboration with resellers. Next, the roadmap includes more education-first initiatives, clearer in-store guidance, and expanded after-sales support. Ultimately, photographers, videographers, streamers, and gamers will gain a simpler, more reliable way to upgrade daily tools. In summary, Lexar’s partner model and retail reach position the brand to scale with MEA’s demand.

Bottom line

The Lexar MEA expansion is about reach, relevance, and reliability. With 5,000+ stores and a strong showing planned for GITEX Global 2025, the company is doubling down on creators and gamers across the Middle East and Africa—therefore bringing pro-grade memory and storage closer to where people work and play.

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