For decades, cybersecurity had one quiet ally: time. An attacker had to find the weakness, build the exploit, then move through a network. This process took days, sometimes weeks. This meant the reactive approach to defense survived because attacks moved at human speed. That gap between known vulnerability and time to exploit was where defenders lived.
Frontier AI models just closed it.
The same systems accelerating business are now compressing reconnaissance and exploit generation from weeks into minutes. These attacks are automated, at scale, and formed from little more than a prompt. The math defenders have relied on for decades no longer holds. The manual, human-speed work we’ve always asked of defenders simply can’t keep pace anymore.
Most organizations are entering this new era with a visibility problem they haven’t solved from the last one.
“I still don’t have confidence in my assets,” one customer told me recently. Another: “I don’t know what’s gone to last-day-of-support.” A third, more pointed: “I don’t know what to tell my Board when they ask how we’re protected against mythos-level attacks.”
Sound familiar?
These are conversations I’m having every day, with organizations across every industry and in every part of the world.
Behind each of these is the same root cause. Organizations have been piecing together visibility of their assets from spreadsheets and disparate data sources, some more reliable than others, then making calculated bets on critical business decisions that they can’t afford to lose.
This is the environment we built Cisco IQ to address.
Today, more than 5,000 organizations use Cisco IQ for complete visibility into their environment and to provide actionable insights that help them shift from reacting to predicting.
Take last-day-of-support (LDOS) devices. A few years ago, these were an operational nuisance, a maintenance line item. Today, they’re ground zero for a new generation of attacks. These aren’t theoretical weaknesses or potential issues. They’re working, exploitable vulnerabilities, active today. Last year, 40% of the top 100 vulnerabilities targeted end-of-life devices, and that number is predicted to rise significantly in 2026.[1] An unsupported device isn’t just unpatched. It’s an open door.
One customer put it this way after their first look at what Cisco IQ found in their own environment:
“When I first saw what Cisco IQ surfaced, my reaction was, ‘This cannot be right, it’s too much, too fast, too clear.’ It felt too good to be true. Then I realized: this is what it looks like when the system actually knows your environment.”
While the industry debated whether AI would change the threat landscape, we were already building the capabilities needed to answer it: the visibility, the automation, the machine speed, and the resilience organizations would need before they knew to ask for it.
Our customers already have access. If you have a Cisco Support contract, you have Cisco IQ.
Here’s how Cisco IQ applies 40 years of institutional knowledge to your specific environment, moving you from reactive firefighting to proactive, always-on resilience.
1. Landscape Clarity: You Can’t Defend What You Can’t See
Most environments are messier than the people running them anticipate. Devices remain in production for years, sometimes decades. Configurations drift. Shadow infrastructure spins up without anyone signing off. Every blind spot is a place an attacker can operate unobserved, and machine-speed attacks find them faster than any quarterly audit can.
Reactive security tolerates gaps because it assumes defenders will catch trouble when it surfaces. That assumption no longer holds. What today’s landscape demands is real-time, comprehensive visibility across the whole environment: a live picture of what’s in production, how it’s configured, and where it’s exposed. Not a snapshot from last quarter.
Clarity is the precondition for everything else. You can’t prioritize risk you can’t see.
2. Proactive Resilience: Every Outage Has a Trail, and Cisco IQ Finds It Before You Feel It
The average unplanned outage doesn’t come out of nowhere. There was a misconfigured policy. A vulnerability that sat unpatched. A compliance gap nobody flagged in time. Customers didn’t miss these because they weren’t looking. They didn’t have the bandwidth to look everywhere at once.
Once a patch ships, the vulnerability is public. From that moment, it’s a race between defenders and everyone trying to exploit it, a race that, at machine speed, defenders lose every time unless the approach itself changes.
3. Rapid Resolution: Fix Fast, Then Make It Permanent
Resolution speed used to be measured against service level objectives. Now, it’s measured against the attack. A machine-speed threat propagates while teams are still reconstructing context, so the old war-room model, where the problem waits until a team assembles, no longer holds. What’s needed is root cause analysis that can identify and prioritize the right fix among hundreds of findings. Every resolution should also feed back into the system, so the next detection is faster and that class of failure becomes less likely. That’s resilience instead of firefighting, with each resolution compounding at the same speed the threat is mutating.
Human Expertise Meets Machine Speed in Cisco IQ
At Cisco, we understand that clarity, resilience, and continuous improvement are easy to nod along to and hard to operationalize. They demand a speed and scale no human team can sustain alone, and a judgment no automation can fully replace. Lean too far toward people, and organizations can’t keep up. Lean too far toward automation, and they drown in noise and false positives.
We address this in Cisco IQ, which becomes the common foundation for all of Cisco’s Support and Professional Services. With Cisco IQ, we combine the power of machine-speed insights and automation with the nuanced judgment of human expertise.
In June, we introduced Resilient Infrastructure Services, an always-on, comprehensive approach to infrastructure resiliency built around three pillars:
- Exposure Assessment: Map the entire attack surface, prioritizing critical assets and remediation.
- Infrastructure Modernization: Implement structural hardening with Zero Trust principles and operational agility to close the attack window.
- Defense Resiliency: Maintain continuous defense mechanisms that can keep pace with AI-driven threats.
Unlock Post-Frontier AI Model Defense
Frontier AI models changed the game. Drastically, quickly, and permanently, leaving organizations to figure out what comes next.
We anticipated it. We’ve been planning for it. With Cisco IQ, here’s where to start:
- Already have a Cisco Support contract? Log in and onboard to Cisco IQ today. Start with the Cisco IQ: Getting Started Guide.
- Want to move fast? Cisco IQ comes in a SaaS deployment so you can start the journey quickly and realize the same value more than 5,000 customers already enjoy, with new security and defense capabilities rolling out in the coming weeks and months.
- Not a customer yet? Visit the Cisco Support page to learn more about Cisco IQ.
Reactive defense isn’t enough. It hasn’t been for years. The difference now is that machine speed made the gap impossible to ignore and, for the first time, possible to close.
Read more:
- For an under-the-hood look at how we engineered the core capabilities of Cisco IQ: From Vision to Reality: Intelligence in Action with Cisco IQ
- For the bigger picture on what security looks like in the AI era, watch the fireside chat on Security in the AI Era, where Jeetu Patel lays out the strategy behind this shift.
- For a deep dive into the new Cisco IQ capabilities coming this month: Cisco IQ: Scaling Secure Resilience
[1] Source: https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2025yearinreview/
