In the lead up to this week’s ServiceNow Knowledge25 event, the workflow and AI software giant detailed a new partnership with Cisco to help customers secure AI applications and data at scale.
ServiceNow and Cisco will achieve that objective by integrating Cisco’s infrastructure and security platforms and ServiceNow’s AI‑driven platform and security applications.
Partnerships such as this one are vital in light of: a proliferation of AI applications and agents, the risky practice of shadow AI as employees sidestep or ignore policies and practices, and the strong visibility challenges that arise when there are so many new and ungoverned applications on the corporate network. Companies have also been slow to put in place the strategic governance controls that are needed to exert strong oversight.
ServiceNow-Cisco Approach
Because AI adoption across enterprises includes internal applications, commercial SaaS platforms, and Shadow AI apps, Cisco and ServiceNow aim to provide customers with a consistent, cohesive set of tools for protecting AI applications and data while maintaining AI governance.
The first planned integration by ServiceNow and Cisco will address AI security and risk by unifying Cisco AI Defense and ServiceNow Security Operations (SecOps). This will give customers the ability to conduct management and monitoring of AI assets across the organization while ensuring strict data governance, reliability, and trust.
The combination of Cisco AI Defense and ServiceNow SecOps is designed to provide customers five distinct benefits in terms of security controls:
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Visibility: Cisco AI Defense will discover AI workloads, models, and data tied to applications and services in the ServiceNow platform.
Vulnerability Management: Cisco AI Defense will conduct automated vulnerability assessments, with findings surfaced in ServiceNow Vulnerability Response, where they are monitored, triaged, and addressed.
Real‑time Protection: Cisco AI Runtime Protection offers real‑time guardrails for AI applicatins. ServiceNow Security Posture Control can identify gaps in coverage from AI Runtime Protection and this data can be made available for AI vulnerability prioritization.
Incident Response: Cisco AI Defense will deliver telemetry from AI applications to ServiceNow Security Incident Response to enhance security operations center investigations and facilitate proactive threat response.
Governance: Customers will be able to map Cisco AI Defense controls to relevant standards in ServiceNow’s Integrated Risk Management platform in order to measure and demonstrate AI organizational compliance.
Mutual customers of Cisco and ServiceNow will gain access to these integrations in the second half of calendar 2025, the companies said.
With this partnership, two of the most important, and widely used, providers of AI-driven workflow management, IT infrastructure, and security software are combining forces to ensure customers have the visibility, tooling, and governance needed to lock down their AI applications and data and take a major step toward reining in Shadow AI. That’s a win for the customer bases of both firms.
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