In today’s rapidly evolving AI landscape, organizations face a critical challenge: how to harness the transformative power of generative AI while maintaining robust security and compliance standards. As enterprises deploy increasingly sophisticated GenAI applications, the need for comprehensive protection across the entire AI lifecycle has never been more urgent.
Today, Cisco is pleased to announce a native integration of Cisco AI Defense runtime guardrails with NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails, a part of NVIDIA Enterprise software, bringing together two powerful solutions to maximize cybersecurity for enterprise AI deployments.
Why Guardrails Matter: The Critical First Line of Defense
Generative AI applications are fundamentally different from traditional software. They’re dynamic, probabilistic, and can produce unexpected outputs based on user interactions. Without proper safeguards, GenAI applications can generate harmful, biased, or inappropriate content, leak sensitive information through prompt injection attacks, hallucinate facts, deviate from intended use cases, or violate regulatory compliance requirements.
Runtime guardrails serve as the essential safety mechanisms that monitor and control AI behavior in real-time. Think of them as intelligent traffic controllers that ensure your AI applications stay within safe, compliant boundaries while maintaining performance and user experience. As organizations move from AI experimentation to production deployments, these guardrails have become non-negotiable components of any responsible AI strategy.
Guardrails are only as effective as their underlying detection models and the frequency of updates made to capture the latest threat intelligence. Enterprises shouldn’t rely on the built-in guardrails created by model developers, as they are different for each model, largely optimized for performance over security, and alignment is easily broken when changes to the model are made. Enterprise guardrails, such as those by Cisco AI Defense and NVIDIA NeMo, provide a common layer of security across models, allowing AI teams to focus fully on development.
NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails: A Leading Open-Source Toolkit
NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails has emerged as a leading open-source framework for building programmable guardrails for generative AI applications. This powerful toolkit enables developers to define input and output boundaries for LLM interactions, implement topical guardrails to keep conversations on track, enforce fact-checking and hallucination prevention, and control dialogue flow and user interaction patterns. As a framework-level solution, NeMo Guardrails provides the structural foundation for AI safety, giving developers the flexibility to define rules and policies tailored to their specific use cases.
The framework’s widespread adoption across the industry reflects its robust architecture and developer-friendly approach. Organizations appreciate the ability to create custom guardrails that align with their unique business requirements while leveraging NVIDIA AI infrastructure and acceleration.
Cisco AI Defense: A Comprehensive AI Security Solution
Runtime guardrails, while essential, are just one piece of the AI security puzzle. Cisco AI Defense takes a holistic approach to AI security, protecting organizations across the entire AI lifecycle from development through production.
AI Defense uses a three-step framework to protect against AI safety, security and privacy risks:
- Discovery: automatically inventory AI assets including models, agents, knowledge bases, and vector stores across your distributed cloud environments.
- Detection: uncover model and application vulnerabilities, including supply chain risks and susceptibility to jailbreaks, unsafe responses, and more.
- Protection: protect runtime applications with proprietary safety, security, and privacy guardrails, updated with the latest threat intelligence.
The security journey doesn’t end at deployment. Cisco AI Defense provides continuous validation through ongoing testing to identify new vulnerabilities in models and applications. As new risks emerge, additional guardrails can be introduced to address these or models can be swapped. This ensures that deployed models maintain their security posture over time and continue to meet internal and external standards.
Rather than leaving security implementation to individual application teams, organizations can enforce enterprise-wide runtime controls that align AI behavior with corporate security and compliance requirements. Through its integration with NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails, Cisco AI Defense makes these controls seamlessly accessible within developer workflows, embedding security as a native part of the AI development lifecycle. This continuous validation and centralized protection model ensures deployed models and applications maintain a strong security posture over time, while vulnerability reports translate findings into clear insights mapped to industry and regulatory standards.
Better Together: Boosting Cybersecurity Defenses with Cisco Accelerated by NVIDIA
The native integration of Cisco AI Defense with NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails delivers powerful cybersecurity for enterprise AI deployments. Rather than relying on a single layer of protection, this integration gives developers the flexibility to combine the most effective guardrails for each aspect of their applications—whether focused on safety, security, privacy, or conversational flow and topic control.
By bringing together NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails’ open-source framework for defining and enforcing conversational and contextual boundaries with Cisco AI Defense’s enterprise-grade runtime guardrails for safeguarding data, detecting threats, and maintaining compliance, organizations gain a modular and interoperable architecture for protecting AI in production.
This collaboration enables developers to mix and match guardrails across domains, ensuring that AI systems behave responsibly, securely, and consistently—without sacrificing performance or agility. NeMo Guardrails provides the foundation for structured, customizable controls within AI workflows, while Cisco AI Defense adds continuously updated runtime protection powered by real-time threat intelligence.
Together, they enable coordinated guardrail layers that extend across the AI lifecycle—from how applications manage sensitive information to how they interact with users—creating a unified and adaptable defense strategy. With this native integration, enterprises can innovate faster while maintaining confidence that their AI systems are protected by the right safeguards for every stage of operation.
Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA
Understanding that every organization has unique infrastructure requirements and security policies, Cisco and NVIDIA have partnered to provide a validated reference architecture to securely power AI workloads in a customer’s environment. We offer two deployment options for the data plane: cloud-based or on-premises with Cisco AI PODs.
Today, we’re announcing orderability of Cisco AI Defense on AI PODs with our data plane deployed on-premises. This can also be deployed alongside NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails. This means that companies facing strict data sovereignty requirements, compliance mandates, or operational needs can achieve AI application security for on-premises deployments.
The Path Forward: Secure AI Innovation
As organizations accelerate their AI transformation journeys, security cannot be an afterthought. The native integration of Cisco AI Defense with NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails, delivered through Cisco Secure AI Factory, represents a new standard for enterprise AI security—one that doesn’t force you to choose between innovation and protection.
With this powerful combination, you can deploy GenAI applications with confidence, knowing that multiple layers of defense are working in concert to protect your organization. You can meet the most stringent security and compliance requirements without sacrificing performance or user experience. You maintain the flexibility to evolve your infrastructure as your needs change and as AI technology advances. Perhaps most importantly, you leverage the combined expertise of two AI industry leaders who are both committed to making AI safe, secure, and accessible for enterprises.