Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) is making a serious push into 5G-era security and AI infrastructure, unveiling a suite of new firewall, encryption, and threat-detection tools designed for a world where attacks are getting craftier and networks are getting more complex.

Here's the problem Cisco is trying to solve: as workloads migrate toward the edge and ultra-low latency becomes table stakes, service providers need security that's both flexible and adaptive. Static defenses don't cut it anymore when traffic patterns shift constantly and threats evolve by the hour.

The market seems to like the strategy. Cisco stock has jumped 29% year-to-date, largely on the back of its expanding role in AI infrastructure.

Security Gets a Major Overhaul

Over the past few years, Cisco teams have fundamentally reengineered their approach to mobile-infrastructure security. Some of these innovations are already deployed with customers, while others remain in internal testing.

The company has delivered distributed virtual private network (VPN) capability on its Secure Firewall 4200 Series, with support for the 6100 Series coming shortly. Large IPsec tunnels can now scale across up to 16 clustered firewalls, and Cisco added loopback tunnel termination to simplify routing and boost fault tolerance.

As service providers hunt for new 5G revenue streams, Cisco is enabling workloads to move closer to the edge across both telco and public clouds. For Open RAN deployments, Cilium CNI—which Cisco acquired through its purchase of Isovalent—now provides native encryption between Kubernetes pods.

The company's three-year partnership with Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) continues to deliver results, enhancing crypto offload and flow acceleration for high-performance firewall virtual machines.

AI Joins the Fight Against Mobile Threats

Cisco is strengthening inspection and filtering for GTP, Diameter, and SCTP protocols in line with the latest 3GPP and GSMA standards. But meeting compliance requirements isn't enough when sophisticated new threats keep emerging.

That's where AI enters the picture. Cisco is experimenting with AI-assisted detection using its Cisco Foundation AI 8B model, combined with Talos threat intelligence and deep network telemetry to spot mobile-specific attack patterns that traditional methods might miss.

The Splunk acquisition is proving valuable here, too. Cisco is using Splunk's capabilities to tackle one of the trickiest correlation challenges in mobile networks—linking GTP-C and GTP-U sessions across different pieces of equipment.

Performance That Scales

Cisco's Secure Firewall 4200 and 6100 platforms deliver the kind of performance mobile networks demand, with the 6100 supporting more than 80 instances.

The company's Encrypted Visibility Engine (EVE) identifies compromised devices even when all traffic is encrypted—particularly useful for the GI/N6 interface where user experience and protection both need to stay strong. Cisco is training EVE to detect mobile-specific threats and plans to expose its signals through APIs for integration with deep packet inspection and other security tools.

Cisco is also enhancing firewall policies with mobile context by using eBPF to trace subscriber identifiers like IMSI and IMEI directly from the packet core. Meanwhile, carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) keeps advancing with deterministic NAT, DS-Lite support, and improved dashboards for easier monitoring and troubleshooting.

The company simplifies compliance with new 3GPP requirements for microsegmentation, mTLS, OAuth, and encryption through Cilium CNI's identity-aware segmentation and unified enforcement model.

With Hypershield moving on-premises, Cisco is introducing Distributed Exploit Protection via the Tetragon agent. This identifies emerging vulnerabilities and applies compensating controls before patches become available—critical for mobile networks that need to stay online around the clock.

Quantum Computing on the Horizon

Last week, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and Cisco announced a partnership to build the foundation for networked, distributed quantum computing. The collaboration combines IBM's quantum-computing expertise with Cisco's advances in quantum networking to scale beyond today's limited systems.

The two companies plan to demonstrate a proof-of-concept network within five years that links large fault-tolerant quantum computers. If successful, this could pave the way for breakthrough applications in materials science, medicine, and large-scale optimization problems.

Price Action: CSCO stock was trading higher by 0.67% to $76.61 at last check Monday.