Presented by Cisco

Ask any network operations leader what changed this year, and most won't point to a single incident. They'll tell you the timeline changed. The pace of enterprise IT used to be dictated by the people running it, patch cycles, audit schedules, change windows. Frontier AI models don't wait for any of that.

Cisco has a name for what that shift produces: a post-Mythos threat, an attack built and adapted by AI capable of compressing reconnaissance, exploit development, and lateral movement into a single automated pass. Most enterprise infrastructure was never designed to be watched, patched, and defended at that speed, and the businesses running it are only starting to find out.

“The math defenders have relied on for decades no longer holds,” says Liz Centoni, EVP and Chief Customer Experience Officer at Cisco. “Reconnaissance and exploit generation that used to take weeks now take minutes, sometimes less. Quarterly audits and static inventories were never built to survive that, and most organizations are only now finding out.”

Last year, 40% of the top 100 vulnerabilities targeted end-of-life devices, according to Cisco Talos threat intelligence, and Cisco expects that number to climb through 2026. An unsupported device isn't a maintenance line item anymore. It's an open door.

“Here's the law,” Centoni says. “An asset you can't see is an asset you can't defend, and at machine speed, you don't get a second chance to find it first. I hear a version of the same worry from customers constantly: they don't know what's passed last-day-of-support, and they don't know what to tell their board when the question is how they're protected against a Mythos-level attack. That's not a visibility gap. That's exposure they're carrying without knowing it.”

A structural answer, not another dashboard

Cisco's response is Resilient Infrastructure Services, built on three moves: rapid exposure assessment that finds and prioritizes what's actually at risk, infrastructure modernization that hardens the environment using Zero Trust principles, and continuous defense that keeps adapting as the threat does.

The modernization piece often gets treated as the least urgent of the three, since replacing infrastructure takes longer than scanning for it. Centoni pushes back on that ordering. Zero Trust principles only hold if the underlying architecture can actually enforce them, and a lot of enterprise infrastructure still can't. Assessment tells a customer what's exposed. Modernization is what closes the door, and continuous defense is what keeps it closed as the threat keeps moving.

“Every unplanned outage has a trail,” Centoni says. “A misconfigured policy. A vulnerability that sat unpatched a little too long. A compliance gap nobody flagged in time. Customers didn't miss those signals because they weren't looking. They didn't have the bandwidth to look everywhere at once. That's the problem we built this to solve, not with more alerts, but with the judgment to know which ones matter.”

All of it runs on Cisco IQ, now used by thousands of organizations for a live picture of their environment instead of a quarterly one.

“An inventory is a list. A dashboard is simply a list with better formatting,” Centoni says. “What actually changes the outcome is connecting lifecycle status to known vulnerabilities, to how an asset is really configured and used, and keeping all of it current instead of refreshed on a schedule. That's the difference between a system that tracks an environment and one that actually understands it.”

John Hoenemier from GlobalFoundries put it even more simply. "You can't navigate what's coming with a map when what you really need is a GPS," he told audiences at Cisco Live in June. "Cisco IQ makes it simple to pinpoint exactly which devices are exposed to a vulnerability. I can drill down, see specific threat details, and instantly know my next move."

Resolution measured against the attack, not the SLA

Speed of detection is only half the equation. The other half is what happens next.

“Resolution used to be measured against a service level agreement. Now it has to be measured against the attack,” Centoni says. “A machine-speed threat doesn't wait for a team to assemble and reconstruct context from scratch. Every remediation and fix has to feed back into the system, so the next detection is faster and that class of failure gets less likely to happen again. That's resilience. Firefighting is what you do when you don't have that.”

It's also, Centoni argues, a shift in what customers should expect from a support relationship altogether.

“For years, a customer's first job in an emergency was explaining their own network to the person supposed to be fixing it,” she says. “That's time nobody has anymore, and it's an unreasonable ask of a team that's already stretched. The relationship has to start from what's already known, not from zero.”

What “always ahead” actually means

Centoni is direct about where this leaves organizations still running on the old model.

“The organizations still planning around static inventories and manual triage aren't behind on tools,” she says. “They're planning for a threat landscape that doesn't exist anymore. AI didn't just change how fast attackers move. It changed what a defender's head start is worth, and right now, for most companies, it's worth nothing.”

That's the thinking behind Cisco's “always ahead” positioning: not reacting faster to the same threats, but building infrastructure that doesn't leave openings to react to in the first place.

“The question was never whether AI would change the threat landscape,” Centoni says. “It's whether your infrastructure changes with it, or waits to find out the hard way.”

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