When we launched Cisco IQ, we moved from fragmented, reactive infrastructure management to a unified, proactive, and deterministic operational reality accelerated by AI. With over 1,500 customers onboarded in just six weeks, we are seeing firsthand how this intelligence engine is transforming our customers’ experience. But intelligence is not a static destination – it is an evolving capability.

As we continue to build out the Cisco IQ roadmap, I am excited to share the next wave of innovations being announced at Cisco Live this week. Coming in July 2026, we are simplifying the ability to address the critical security continuum: yesterday’s technical debt, today’s operational reality, and tomorrow’s architectural threats.

1. Resilient Infrastructure Services

To secure this continuum, we must first address the most immediate danger: the convergence of aging infrastructure and machine-speed attacks. Yesterday’s debt – aging infrastructure – is today’s open backdoor.

The post-Mythos era has permanently changed the rules of engagement. As our Talos team has reported, AI-driven threats are mapping and exploiting networks at machine speed. We are seeing thousands of critical vulnerabilities identified in weeks, medium CVEs chained into critical breach paths, and the window from patch release to adversarial reverse-engineering shrinking to mere hours.

To help customers cut through this chaos, we are introducing Resilient Infrastructure Services. This framework provides a three-phased structured approach to infrastructure hardening. While Phase 1 serves as the foundational prerequisite, these three phases are not strictly sequential; they form an iterative cycle that adapts as we continuously expand our capabilities:

• Phase 1: Exposure Assessment: The goal is immediate discovery and risk mapping. We begin by mapping the attack surface and threats to your Cisco infrastructure to provide prioritized security and operational actions. The “Resilient Infrastructure Playbook” within Cisco IQ digitizes this process, empowering customers to make progress immediately. It delivers rapid-response recommendations, including compensating controls, surgical fixes, and focused upgrades, to quickly reduce exposure.
• Phase 2: Infrastructure Modernization: The goal is structural hardening and operational agility. We move from rapid response to structural modernization. Grounded in a comprehensive Zero Trust framework, this phase goes beyond perimeter defense. Cisco IQ equips our customers through our Professional Services teams to validate device and workload compliance, enforce network segmentation to drastically shrink the attack surface, and assess cryptographic controls across the edge and core. By accelerating patch velocity through automation, we simultaneously shrink the attack window.
• Phase 3: Defense Resiliency: The goal is continuous, autonomous defense. Zero Trust is not a static architecture; it is a continuous operational loop. To ensure long-term defense resiliency, we deploy advanced tooling for continuous threat hunting and iteratively refine SOC playbooks. Breaking down silos between identity, network traffic, and incident management, we are laying the foundation for a self-healing infrastructure, transitioning from generating real-time alerts to executing automated, agentic policy enforcement.

We will be rapidly iterating and expanding this capability, supporting our customers through Cisco Professional Services and our extensive partner ecosystem to drive these outcomes at scale.

2. Navigating the Quantum Era: Quantum Ready Assessments

While we harden infrastructure against today’s AI-driven attacks, we must simultaneously prepare for tomorrow’s fight. Quantum computing will break many of the encryption systems in use today, and the clock is ticking. As cryptographic controls are the bedrock of any Zero Trust architecture, preparing for this shift is an immediate operational imperative.

Three distinct vectors are driving the imminence of Q-Day, the day when quantum computers become powerful enough to break traditional public-key encryption standards:

• Advances in Vertical Scaling: Massive hardware leaps in quantum processor capabilities alongside critical advancements in quantum error correction.
• Advances in Horizontal Scaling: Quantum networking is becoming a reality. Cisco recently announced the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch and network-aware Quantum Compiler, which together route, translate, and orchestrate quantum algorithms across different encoding modalities over standard telecom fiber.
• Advances in Algorithms: Recent algorithmic breakthroughs have shattered previous timelines, drastically reducing the logical qubit counts required to break current encryption methods.

Adversaries are already employing “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” (HNDL) tactics. To move organizations from uncertainty to action, we are introducing the Quantum Ready Assessment within Cisco IQ.

This assessment evaluates secure communications and secure platforms to determine crypto-agility at both the device and infrastructure levels. From this deep technical analysis, Cisco IQ generates a practical roadmap of recommended actions, enabling your resources to focus where they matter most to build a crypto-agile future.

3. Meeting You Where You Are: Cisco IQ On-Premises Air-Gapped

To deliver these advanced resilience and quantum capabilities to all our customers, we must accommodate the strictest data governance requirements. For many organizations in highly regulated sectors, data sovereignty and local control are non-negotiable.

Starting in July 2026, we are rolling out Cisco IQ for air-gapped, on-premises deployments. This secure, local component integrates our intelligence capabilities directly into your environment, operating entirely within your network boundaries. It provides asset insights and automated assessments on-premises, offering the flexibility to leverage Cisco IQ while supporting your organization’s alignment with compliance standards.

4. Contextualized Intelligence: Peer Benchmarking

Intelligence is most valuable when it is contextual. Knowing your infrastructure’s health is a baseline; identifying gaps and prioritizing investments requires knowing how that health compares to the broader industry.

We are introducing Peer Benchmarking to Cisco IQ. Built on a foundation of strict data anonymization and privacy, this capability allows you to compare your Last Day of Support (LDOS) risk exposure, Security Advisory vulnerability exposure, and telemetry connectivity against peers. By filtering these insights by vertical, market segment, and geography, IT teams can make highly targeted, data-driven investment decisions to stay competitive.

A Unified Operational Ecosystem

Finally, Cisco IQ’s extensible architecture paves the way for our highly anticipated integration.

Unified Operations and Insights: Cisco customers benefit from the seamless integration between Cisco Cloud Control and Cisco IQ. Cisco Cloud Control delivers real-time monitoring and AI-powered collaboration for operations teams managing live environments. Cisco IQ provides IT leaders with proactive lifecycle insights, expert guidance, and personalized support. Together, they share data bi-directionally to create a unified Cisco experience that helps customers move from insight to action, resolve issues faster, and achieve better business outcomes.

To bring this vision to life, our initial integration gives customers the ability to seamlessly access Cisco IQ directly from the Cisco Cloud Control operations console, as well as the ability to open support cases enriched with full context. This ensures a frictionless handoff between real-time network execution and expert-led resolution.

Governing the Agentic Enterprise

These additions are more than just new features; they are the next structural steps in building true digital resilience. As we deploy AI that moves fast, we are backing it with governance that never cuts corners. Cisco IQ remains deterministic by design, keeping the human in the loop and prioritizing precision before probability.

The foundation is set, and the intelligence is scaling. I invite you to explore these new capabilities and continue transforming your operational reality today.