- Discovery and governance for AI agents: Provide a map of the org’s agentic activity, vet policy to resolve hygiene issues, reduce attack surfaces, and prevent compliance violations.
- Agentic access and lifecycle management: Manage AI agents and their NHIs from provisioning to decommissioning.
- Agentic threat detection and response: Detect and respond to threats such as compromised credentials and out-of-scope agent actions.
“As organizations race to adopt agentic technologies, security teams are under real pressure to enable their teams while securing the use of agents,” Bailey wrote. “But agent capabilities are advancing faster than most security models, creating a widening gap in visibility, governance, and response. According to Cisco’s AI Readiness Index, only 24% of organizations can control agent actions with proper guardrails and live monitoring, and just 31% feel fully capable of securing their agent AI systems.”
Agents and other NHIs outnumber humans 100:1, they remain under the radar, and they create the biggest blind spot in our identity perimeter, stated Astrix Security co-founders Alon Jackson and Idan Gour in a blog about the deal.
“Astrix became the platform security teams turn to when they need to discover, govern, and protect every agentic and non-human identity across their environment, from provisioning to decommissioning, from policy enforcement to real-time threat detection,” the co-founders wrote. “Joining Cisco means Astrix now has the scale, the reach, and the platform to bring agentic and NHI security to organizations worldwide. “
Astrix is the second AI-management-related acquisition Cisco has made in recent weeks. In April, Cisco announced plans to acquire AI observability firm Galileo Technologies.
Galileo’s platform provides real-time observability and guardrails for the development of multi-agent systems. The technology will strengthen Cisco’s Splunk observability portfolio and bring improved AI agent monitoring capabilities, real-time visibility, and protection to the agent development lifecycle, according to Cisco.
