We’ve fused 40 years of Cisco expertise with agentic intelligence to help IT leaders move from reactive firefighting to proactive resilience.
The AI era did not arrive with a warning. It arrived mid-cycle, mid-budget, and mid-transformation, landing squarely on infrastructure that was never designed for it.
I know this because I lived it. Running a services organization at scale, I watched brilliant engineers spend most of their time on work that should not have existed. Pulling data from dozens of systems before a single customer conversation. Re-explaining environment context to engineers who should have already known it. Responding to outages that had visible signals which nobody caught in time.
That is what Cisco IQ was built to change.
The Problem
Over 40 percent of outages start as misconfigurations nobody caught in time.
Sophisticated actors do not need a novel exploit. They are going after aged infrastructure organizations knew about and did not prioritize. Our Talos team confirmed it: 40 percent of top-targeted vulnerabilities last year impacted end-of-life devices. 32 percent are over a decade old.
The signal was there. Nobody was looking in the right place at the right time.
Your best engineers should be changing your business. Not re-explaining your environment for the fourth time this quarter. Not spending their week interpreting data instead of acting on it. And, not starting support interactions from zero.
That is the model we are replacing.
What Cisco IQ Is
It is the delivery vehicle for everything Cisco Support and Professional Services knows about your environment, made continuously available before you ask for it. Forty years of institutional knowledge, every design pattern, every configuration risk we have seen turn into an outage, encoded and active inside your environment from day one.
Every agentic action is deterministic, validated, and governed before it touches your infrastructure. AI surfaces. Humans decide. Accountability stays with Cisco.
It delivers across four pillars:
- Complete landscape clarity.
You cannot protect what you cannot see. Cisco IQ provides a real-time, benchmarked view of every Cisco asset, configuration, and risk. Starting in July, you will see how your posture compares against peers in your industry, your size, your sector. When you are asked whether you are ahead or behind, this is the answer that is specific, defensible, and current. - Proactive resilience.
Cisco IQ surfaces and prioritizes critical risks before they impact your business, powering a proactive infrastructure resilience model instead of a reactive one. Not 400 alerts. A ranked action list your team can actually execute, with the evidence and reasoning already built in. - Rapid resolution.
Troubleshooting is a bottleneck of time and resources. The moment a case opens, your full environment context is already there.Your engineer does not brief our TAC. TAC briefs itself.
Cisco IQ can collapse resolution timelines from hours to minutes by understanding your specific environment. - Contextualized professional services.
Cisco IQ eliminates the learning curve with the collective experience of our global experts embedded directly into your workflow across the entire lifecycle. Projects land faster. Rework drops. And the confidence you bring when you commit to a timeline is backed by something real.
What the Results Look Like
Close to 90 customers globally. Not projections.
A global financial services organization eliminated hundreds of hours of manual data reconciliation. A European manufacturer gained visibility into risk exposures that had been invisible for years.
At Nestlé, the most powerful outcome was not operational. It was organizational. IT leaders finally had the defensible data to have an honest conversation with business stakeholders about aging infrastructure. That conversation used to be a negotiation without evidence. Cisco IQ made it a conversation with proof.
That is the outcome that matters most to me. Not faster resolution times. Not reduced alert volume. The moment when the person running IT walks into a meeting with data that changes the decision.
What Changes
Cisco IQ is generally available today in the SaaS deployment mode.
If you are an existing Cisco Support and Professional Services customer, this is not something you need to budget for. It is already part of what you have. The question is whether you are using it.
If you are evaluating your options, the right question is not what Cisco IQ costs. It is what the current model is costing you every month in engineering hours spent on work that should not exist, in outages with signals nobody caught, and in conversations you are not yet equipped to have.
The organizations that will lead the AI era are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones whose infrastructure works for them, not the other way around.
That is what Cisco IQ is built to do.
Learn more:
- Cisco IQ deep-dive blog, “From Vision to Reality: Intelligence in Action with Cisco IQ”
- Cisco.com
