Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) is doubling down on 5G-era security and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, rolling out new firewall, encryption, and threat-detection technologies.
As workloads push toward the edge and ultra-low latency becomes non-negotiable, service providers need flexible and adaptive security that keeps pace.
Cisco stock has gained 29% year-to-date, backed by its expanding role in AI infrastructure.
Also Read: Cisco Stock Climbs After Launching New AI Platform
Over the past several years, Cisco teams have reengineered their approach to mobile-infrastructure security—deploying some innovations with customers already and continuing to test others internally.
Cisco has delivered distributed virtual private network (VPN) on the Secure Firewall 4200 Series, with 6100 Series support coming soon.
Large IPsec tunnels can now scale across up to 16 clustered firewalls. Cisco also added loopback tunnel termination to simplify routing and improve fault tolerance.
As service providers chase new 5G revenue opportunities, Cisco enables workloads to move closer to the edge across telco and public clouds.
For Open RAN, Cilium CNI—now part of Cisco through the Isovalent acquisition—adds native encryption between Kubernetes pods.
Cisco's three-year partnership with Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) continues to boost crypto offload and flow acceleration for high-performance firewall VMs.
Cisco is strengthening inspection and filtering for GTP, Diameter, and SCTP in line with the latest 3GPP and GSMA standards. But complex new threats demand more than compliance.
Cisco is experimenting with AI-assisted detection using its Cisco Foundation AI 8B model, Talos threat intelligence, and deep network telemetry to identify mobile-specific attack patterns.
The Splunk acquisition is helping Cisco simplify one of the hardest correlation tasks—linking GTP-C and GTP-U sessions across different equipment.
Cisco's Secure Firewall 4200 and 6100 platforms deliver the performance mobile networks require, with the 6100 supporting 80+ instances.
Cisco's Encrypted Visibility Engine (EVE) identifies compromised devices even when all traffic is encrypted—ideal for the GI/N6 interface where user experience and protection must remain strong.
Cisco is training EVE to detect mobile-specific threats and planning to expose its signals through APIs for use with DPI and other tools.
Cisco also enhances firewall policies with mobile context by using eBPF to trace subscriber identifiers such as IMSI and IMEI directly from the packet core. CGNAT continues advancing with deterministic NAT, DS-Lite, and improved dashboards for easier monitoring and troubleshooting.
Cisco simplifies new 3GPP microsegmentation, mTLS, OAuth, and encryption requirements through Cilium CNI's identity-aware segmentation and unified enforcement model.
With Hypershield coming on-premises, Cisco introduces Distributed Exploit Protection via the Tetragon agent, which identifies emerging vulnerabilities and applies compensating controls before patches are available—essential for always-on mobile networks.
Quantum Networking Partnership With IBM
Last week, International Business Machines Corp (NYSE:IBM) and Cisco announced a new partnership to build the foundation for networked, distributed quantum computing, combining IBM's quantum-computing expertise with Cisco's advances in quantum networking to scale beyond today's systems.
They plan to demonstrate a proof-of-concept network within five years that links large fault-tolerant quantum computers, paving the way for breakthrough applications in materials, medicine, and large-scale optimization.
Price Action: CSCO stock was trading higher by 0.67% to $76.61 at last check Monday.
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