Always-On Assurance: How Cisco is Reimagining the Secure Development Lifecycle

Software security must adapt for the AI era

Generative AI has created a security crisis of scale. It is also the most significant opportunity we have faced in three decades of internet innovation. Every new era of connectivity has made us rethink what resilience means, and this one is no different. AI-generated code brings new complexity, and it also gives us the tools to build security that is more pervasive, proactive, and precise than before.

We are moving beyond the manual security gates of the past. We now use AI to analyze code with unprecedented depth. We have already operationalized a capability like this through our open-sourced Foundry Security Spec, an offensive security harness specification. The more critical shift is in how software is engineered. Product managers, architects, and engineers now use AI agents to draft requirements and generate code in real time. That velocity renders traditional manual security gates obsolete. To stay secure from ideation to release,…