Key messages
Developed in collaboration with NVIDIA and key ecosystem partners, the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA is a modular reference design that helps enterprise customers accelerate the delivery of trusted and transformative AI applications. It combines high-performance AI infrastructure with built-in security, AI-powered monitoring, and advanced software tools—accelerating the operationalization of AI and GenAI pipelines.
By leveraging enterprise data and trusted AI models, it enables organizations to rapidly build and deploy predictive, generative, and reasoning-based applications. The result: faster time to value, trusted AI outcomes, and the ability to unlock new business opportunities through the power of secure, scalable AI.
● It is a security-first solution with observability and resiliency to enable safe AI. Unlike other AI factories in the market, it embeds security and observability at every layer of the stack to help securely develop and deliver trusted AI tokens and applications. Security posture is continuously monitored and analyzed, providing advanced threat detection and incident response.
● Cisco provides high-performance, enterprise-proven networking, accelerated compute, and scalable storage from partners that form the foundation of a secure and efficient AI infrastructure. Together with AI orchestration and application software, these capabilities accelerate every phase of the AI and GenAI pipeline, enabling faster development and delivery of trusted AI outcomes. For more than 40 years, enterprises have relied on Cisco’s market-leading networking, which is now even more critical to the success of AI initiatives.
● Flexible, modular deployment options help operationalize the solution at your own pace and remove infrastructure and security as the barriers to AI adoption. Enterprises have the flexibility to choose between a modular, pre-validated AI infrastructure backed by CVD, or a turnkey AI infrastructure stack, compliant with NVIDIA ERAs. Enterprises also have an option to build their own Secure AI Factory by buying Cisco and partner products separately and integrating them on their own, or with help from Cisco or one of our partners.
What sets Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA apart from AI infrastructure solutions from competitors is its foundational emphasis on security and observability at all layers of the stack, and Cisco’s market-leading high-performance ethernet networking that enterprises have trusted for 40 years. This enables enterprises with exceptional flexibility, enhanced security, and superior performance, equipping them to navigate the evolving landscape of AI with confidence.
Q. What is Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA?
A. Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA is a modular reference design from Cisco, NVIDIA, and our strategic ecosystem partners. It combines high-performance infrastructure with full-stack security and observability to accelerate the delivery of trusted and transformative AI applications for enterprises.
Figure 1.
Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA
Q. What challenges does Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA solve?
A. Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA addresses key challenges enterprises face when operationalizing secure AI infrastructure on premises:
● AI security vulnerabilities: It provides integrated security across the entire AI pipeline—protecting AI models, frameworks, applications, and infrastructure from emerging cyber threats such as prompt injection, adversarial attacks, model poisoning, data leaks, and unauthorized GPU access.
● Networking performance bottlenecks: The solution delivers enterprise-grade, high-performance Ethernet networking to handle heavy east-west (GPU-to-GPU) and north-south (client-to-GPU and GPU-to-storage) traffic generated during AI pipeline phases like training, fine-tuning, and inference, reducing delays and accelerating time to value.
● Complex AI infrastructure deployments: It simplifies the deployment of secure, scalable, and well-architected AI infrastructure by offering a modular reference design that showcases combining AI software, compute, networking, storage, security, observability, and Kubernetes platform into a secure AI infrastructure, helping enterprises avoid stalled AI projects and reduce operational complexity.
This comprehensive approach enables enterprises to deploy trusted, high-performance AI applications on premises with confidence and efficiency.
Q. What are the key functional capabilities included in Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA?
A. The visual below shows the key functional capabilities in the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA modular reference design. These are all critical capabilities that any organization would need to operationalize a secure AI infrastructure, allowing AI practitioners to quickly develop the trusted AI applications that LOBs want to help achieve business goals.
Q. What Cisco and partner products deliver these capabilities in Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA?
Figure 2.
Key capabilities of Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA
A. The Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA modular reference design brings together products from Cisco, NVIDIA, and our broader partner ecosystem to enable a complete, secure AI infrastructure. The visual below illustrates all the components that make up the solution stack. To support customer choice and flexibility, multiple options are available at each layer of the stack as highlighted in the visual below.
Figure 3.
Key products in Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA
Q. How does Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA differ from other AI factories in the market?
A. Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA differentiates in multiple areas:
Security at every layer: Unlike other AI factories in the market, it embeds security at every layer of the stack (AI models and associated software components, applications, workloads, infrastructure) to help securely develop and deliver trusted AI tokens and applications. Cisco AI Defense integrated with NVIDIA AI, Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall that includes Isovalent, Hypershield, and Secure Firewall, and Splunk Enterprise Security enable end-to-end security for the full stack.
Cisco AI Networking: Cisco’s market-leading, high-performance Ethernet networking—trusted by enterprises for 40 years—is the only networking platform in the market with options to deploy switches with Cisco or NVIDIA Spectrum-X silicon.
Observability for AI: Cisco Splunk delivers end-to-end visibility across the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, enabling teams to monitor the performance, quality, security, and cost of their AI infrastructure stack. Specifically, AI Infrastructure Monitoring ensures the AI Infrastructure stack remains performant, resilient, and secure.
Finally, Cisco performs rigorous testing and validation of the modular capabilities of Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, publishing Cisco Validated Designs that help de-risk enterprise deployments.
Q. How is Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA related to Cisco AI PODs?
A. Cisco AI PODs are the building blocks for operationalizing the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA modular reference design for enterprises. There are two types of AI PODs:
Workload PODs: Runs the customer AI workloads such as model training, optimization, and inferencing using Cisco’s T-shirt sized, full-stack Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) optimized for AI workloads.
Services PODs: Delivers essential value-add capabilities such as security, observability, and data services for 1-to-many workload PODs.
Together, these AI PODs enable a modular, scalable, and secure AI infrastructure tailored for enterprise AI adoption.
Q. What are the key security capabilities in the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA?
A. Here are the differentiated security capabilities in Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA:
Securing the AI application: Cisco AI Defense, integrated with NVIDIA AI, empowers the security and AI practitioner teams with comprehensive tools for robust testing and runtime security of LLMs and generative AI applications. Utilizing algorithmic red teaming techniques, AI Defense evaluates generative AI models against diverse security (data privacy, prompt injections, etc.) and safety (e.g., toxic behavior) risks without requiring application modifications. Additionally, AI Defense applies runtime controls to ensure applications comply with leading frameworks, including OPSWAT LLM and MITRE ATLAS.
Securing the workloads and infrastructure: Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall delivers unified security management with consistent, pervasive policy enforcement across multiple control points. Here are the key products that make up Hybrid Mesh Firewall:
1. Cisco Isovalent: Provides enhanced visibility into cloud-native interactions, enabling consistent policy definition and enforcement across software-defined networks.
2. Cisco Hypershield: Protects against adversary lateral movement and proactively mitigates vulnerabilities without requiring patching, all managed through a single interface.
3. Cisco Secure Firewall: Offers advanced threat protection at scale without compromising performance, featuring unified management across all firewall deployments.
Security Operations: Splunk Enterprise Security, a threat detection and incident response platform that enables real-time detection, investigation, and response through powerful analytics, automation, and risk-based insights.
Q. Is Cisco Splunk part of Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA modular reference design?
A.
Yes, Cisco Splunk is now part of Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA for observability and security operations capabilities. The Cisco Splunk Dashboard for AI PODs monitoring provides end-to-end visibility across the AI POD stack, helping ensure maximum uptime, scalability, performance, and infrastructure efficiency.
Observability for AI, powered by Cisco Splunk, delivers end-to-end visibility across Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, enabling teams to monitor the performance, quality, security, and cost of their AI application stack. Specifically, AI Infrastructure Monitoring ensures the AI infrastructure stack remains performant, resilient, and secure.
With
Splunk Observability Cloud, teams gain real-time insights into AI infrastructure health, availability, and resource utilization (e.g., GPU, power, network, nodes, token costs), empowering proactive root cause analysis, rapid issue resolution, and alerts that improve efficiency and reliability.
Splunk Enterprise Security extends this visibility to protect AI workloads, correlating security events from Cisco technologies (AI Defense, Hypershield, Hybrid Mesh Firewall, Isovalent, Hyperfabric AI) with operational data to detect and mitigate threats such as data leaks, prompt injections, and unauthorized access.
Q. Is Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA available today?
A. Yes, please reach out to your Cisco team to help understand your requirements and help operationalize the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA modular reference design in your environment.