Cisco AI Operations (AIOps) for Firewalls

Cisco delivers the critical infrastructure to help organizations thrive in the AI era. By fusing networking, security, observability, and collaboration, we power how people and technology work together.

Briefly describe the nominated organization: history and past performance (up to 1,250 characters):

Cisco's Security Business Group (SBG) has been a global leader in network security for over two decades, protecting organizations worldwide with enterprise-grade firewall solutions. With approximately 700,000 active firewalls deployed globally and 96% of customers operating on-premises, Cisco manages one of the world's largest firewall ecosystems.

Historically, firewall management required deep technical expertise, with customers facing operational challenges including delayed issue detection (2 hours to 3 weeks), manual troubleshooting requiring 20+ clicks by SMEs, and lengthy upgrade planning processes (weeks to months). These inefficiencies resulted in extended Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR), increased operational costs, and potential security vulnerabilities.

In September 2024, Cisco launched AIOps for Firewalls-a transformative AI/ML-powered solution that fundamentally reimagines firewall operations. Built through collaboration between the Security Business Group and Cisco Customer Experience (CX), AIOps operationalizes decades of Technical Assistance Center (TAC) expertise, support case data, bug intelligence, and configuration best practices into an intelligent, automated system. This innovation addresses the core operational challenges that have plagued firewall management, delivering AI-driven insights that enable proactive, predictive operations across any deployment model-on-premises, hybrid, or sovereign cloud.

Outline the organization's achievements since July 1, 2023 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 1,500 characters):

Operational Excellence & Customer Experience

The solution has transformed support operations, eliminating 4,000 TAC cases and delivering 4,000+ inline insights that addressed $1.6M in quarterly configuration costs. These efficiencies drove a 13-point surge in Product CSAT (45% 58%) and a 2.4-point increase in TAC CSAT (87.2% 89.6%). Critical support metrics improved significantly: Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) dropped to 16 days, escalation rates fell to 3.9% (from 5.5%), and bug-encounter rates were reduced to 12.1%.

Technical Innovation at Scale

Processing [REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION] TB of data, [REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION], and [REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION] events daily across [REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION] firewalls, the platform delivers unmatched scale. It has revolutionized security operations by reducing Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) from weeks to near-zero and streamlining troubleshooting from 20+ clicks to a single click. With 23,000+ policies optimized and instant upgrade planning, AIOps now provides real-time intelligence that effectively replaces costly professional services.

Explain why the achievements you have highlighted are unique or significant. If possible compare the achievements to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the organization's past performance (up to 1,500 characters):

Cisco Cloud-Assist represents the industry's first data sovereignty-compliant firewall AIOps solution, delivering three breakthrough innovations:

Data Sovereignty-First Architecture: Unlike competitors (Palo Alto, Fortinet) and cloud-first tools (Dynatrace, Splunk), Cloud-Assist operates seamlessly across on-premises, hybrid, and sovereign cloud deployments without forcing data migration. Customers maintain complete control, selecting compliance regions (EU, APJC, AMER, Fed) while receiving cloud-scale AI insights through "outcome-bound telemetry"-sharing only necessary data for specific insights, critical for security operations requiring strict governance.

Operationalized CX Intelligence at Scale: Cisco uniquely transforms decades of TAC expertise-support cases, bug data, PSIRTs, configuration reviews-into ML-compatible intelligence via the CX Data Processing Pipeline (Cylon). This enables automated, real-time recommendations predicting bugs and PSIRTs, identifying misconfigurations, and guiding upgrade decisions. Best practices update every 30 minutes and deliver inline within products, eliminating manual professional services. No competitor offers this depth of operationalized field knowledge.

Adaptive Intelligence Engine: Purpose-built for firewall telemetry, the AIOps engine combines statistical (SARIMAX) and ML (Prophet) models with dynamic anomaly sensitivity. It correlates anomalies across metrics to derive root causes, triggers guided remediations, and adapts policies based on runtime behavior-converting port-based rules to app-ID-based rules automatically.

While competitors stop at visibility, Cisco delivers guided, reviewable remediations, shifting operations from reactive firefighting to predictive, insight-driven decision-making-establishing the foundation for autonomous, agentic firewall management at scale.