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Humans click. Agents swarm. Instead of one user moving through one app, agents operate through chains of machine-to-machine requests across enterprise data, applications, infrastructure, and AI services. This expands SASE beyond user-to-app access to high-volume, autonomous work that depends on trusted, always-available access.
Agentic AI can drive up to 450% more traffic per task, with AI inference - the process of analyzing and deciding - accounting for 70% of traffic. Longer-lived, upstream-heavy flows become increasingly sensitive to latency, jitter, loss, congestion, and path changes[1].
SASE must evolve from securing connections to governing distributed work: keep the work moving, keep consequential actions inside the mandate, and keep the distributed foundation trusted.
To meet these demands, Cisco SASE brings networking and security together for work that performs, trusted actions, and resilient infrastructure.
Work must perform across more paths. Work may begin at a branch, endpoint, or site, but the outcome can depend on cloud, enterprise, and external services.
Actions need the right trust context. Agents retrieve data, invoke services, trigger workflows, and change systems at machine speed.
Distributed work needs a resilient foundation. Edge, WAN, and cloud paths must stay observable and trustworthy through attack, change, and disruption.
A unified architecture for AI-era work
Cisco SASE brings networking, security, identity context, experience intelligence, and operations into a connected architecture. It helps teams keep distributed work moving, govern supported actions, and preserve trust in the infrastructure that carries them, delivering on these key outcomes.
Work that performs
Accelerate innovation. Get more agent and user work done successfully by reducing slowdowns, retries, timeouts, and failed workflows.
Close the loop. Digital experience monitoring that pinpoints exactly where work is slowing or failing across the device, branch, WAN, Internet, cloud, SaaS, private apps, AI service, or access layer.
Trusted actions
Grant actions, not standing control. Give agents permission for a specific task or action, under defined limits, and let that authority expire with the action.
Extend Zero Trust beyond agents by applying identity, device, posture, ownership, and risk context across users, devices, workloads, and agents.
Resilient infrastructure
Gain confidence. Operate the edge and WAN foundation confidently as agent and user traffic travels across untrusted networks.
Strengthen your cryptographic resilience with hybrid post-quantum protection—helping prepare your network for the era of quantum computing.
Cisco SASE: Proven today. Ready for the agentic era.
Because these capabilities operate as an integrated platform, Cisco SASE helps organizations keep distributed work moving, govern actions with the right context, and respond quickly when conditions change. Shared policy, context, and visibility help teams connect work, enforce controls, and close the operational loop without treating networking, security, and observability as separate problems.
Connect the path. Build a path foundation for distributed work across available transports according to policy.
Enforce the action. Apply access and action controls using identity, endpoint, task, delegation, behavior, and policy context where supported.
Close the loop. Observe the experience, investigate causes, and verify that the workflow recovered where supported.
Intelligent traffic steering: Identify, classify, and steer AI and agent traffic across SASE and SD-WAN, with path selection informed by latency, loss, jitter, and path health.
Intent-based action governance: Inspect agent interactions to identify intended actions and apply policy across models, MCP tools, APIs, web destinations, SaaS, AI services, and private resources.
Integrated context: Bring identity, device, posture, endpoint, network, and agent context together to inform policy and investigation.
Experience intelligence: Combine endpoint, branch, WAN, Internet, cloud, SaaS, application, and AI-service telemetry to pinpoint where work slows or fails.
Unified operations: Use Cisco Cloud Control and AgenticOps workflows to investigate, coordinate response, and validate results across networking, security, and infrastructure.
Invest in today’s priorities. Architect for what comes next.
Start with modernizing remote access, branch transformation, application experience, or unified operations. Next, test whether the architecture can keep distributed work moving, govern consequential actions, and preserve trust at the edge.
Explore the connected architecture across:
Talk to a Cisco expert today. Learn more about Cisco SASE.