By Duncan Riley
Publication Date: 2026-10-26 20:00:00
Cisco Systems Inc. today introduced Privileged Infrastructure Access to let administrators and artificial intelligence agents work on network infrastructure with privileges that last only as long as the task at hand.
The release goes after the excess access network engineers often carry on routers and switches, which Matt Caulfield, vice president of identity products at Cisco, described in a blog post announcing it. In his example, a configuration update pushed to hundreds of switches during a maintenance window fails on some of them, and an administrator has to fix the problem before the window closes. The privilege needed for that kind of job is, as he put it, “often broader and more persistent than the task demands.”
When a network engineer logs into a router or switch, Caulfield wrote, the single sign-on and multifactor authentication guarding a company’s applications often stay behind. Teams that find the approved access route too slow for urgent work carve out…
