Cisco is to broaden its AI agent security footing with the intent to acquire WideField Security. The deal will see WideField’s technology integrated into Cisco's Splunk suite to boost agentic security operation center (SOC) capabilities.

Kamal Hathi, SVP and GM for Splunk, shared the acquisition in a blog post, touting WideField’s ability to standardize and link identity, session, and activity telemetry from multiple sources. With these features, Hathi said Splunk users will be able to assemble context across human, machine, and AI-agentic activity.

Citing a new category of security risk from the rapid deployment of AI agents, machine identities, and autonomous workloads, Hathi called for a new approach to ensure operational guardrails for agents to prevent manipulation from bad actors, keep automated actions within compliance, and discover and respond to threats at machine speed and scale.

“It is imperative to have deterministic data pipelines that correlate telemetry from endpoints, identity systems, networks, and cloud in a format optimized for AI consumption,” Hathi said. “Splunk’s Agentic SOC will be able to assemble session-level signals necessary for deeper analysis by security analysts, allowing these agents to infer whether an action belongs to a legitimate active session or a potentially malicious one.”

“Furthermore, WideField’s technology will strengthen the Cisco Data Fabric by helping incorporate deeper identity and session intelligence, giving customers the context they need to operate AI safely and at scale,” Hathi added.

Founded in 2023, the San Francisco-based WideField specializes in identity security across software as a service (SaaS), cloud, and on-premises. CEO and co-founder Abhay Kulkarni previously served as senior vice president and GM for Cisco's Webex division. Continuing the Cisco connection was the firm’s Series A funding round in March, which saw it raise over $11 million from investors, including Cisco Investments.

With its Splunk integration, WideField’s identity services will work alongside those of recent Cisco acquisition Galileo Technologies. Closed in May, that deal saw Galileo bring real-time visibility and protection into the full agent development life cycle for Splunk, safeguarding agentic AI to help ensure accuracy and transparency in network systems.

Further adding to its security prestige in the AI era, Cisco snapped up Astrix Security for embedding in Cisco Identity Intelligence. Similar to WideField, Astrix focuses on non-human identity (NHI) to discover and govern for AI agent capabilities and map an organization’s agentic activity to check against established security policies.

At this month's Cisco Live event, SDxCentral heard Jeff Schultz, senior vice president of portfolio strategy, stress that Cisco did not believe "that security and networking in the future should be separate practices.” As such, the networking stalwart unveiled a cloud-based centralized control point for customers to manage and secure their infrastructure estates across Cisco's growing set of products and services.

Dubbed Cisco Cloud Control, the portal provides a single login and management plane for products across networking, security, observability, compute, and collaboration. This unification is based on top of Cisco’s Data Fabric, as run by the Splunk suite in the form of a unified data layer.

Cisco Cloud Control touts an Agent Builder where AI agents are created and can be connected to third-party tools, as well as an Agentic Actions for networking suite that acts as a root cause analysis and closed-loop remediation center for a deployed network.