NetApp and Cisco have announced a significant expansion of their long-standing collaboration, delivering enhanced cyber resilience capabilities and new validated solutions to accelerate secure AI deployments for enterprises worldwide.
The two companies are addressing the dual challenges of sophisticated cyber threats and the infrastructure demands of AI workloads through integrated innovations that strengthen both security and performance.
Strengthening defence-in-depth against ransomware
A key highlight of the announcement is the launch of the new NetApp Splunk SOAR playbook, which extends security automation directly to the storage layer. This development enables organisations to contain ransomware attacks more effectively and minimise data loss by orchestrating rapid response actions on NetApp ONTAP storage systems.
The playbook allows Splunk SOAR users to automatically block suspicious users, create immutable snapshots, and take compromised data volumes offline. By integrating with existing Splunk Enterprise Security and NetApp Ransomware Resilience capabilities, it provides deep, real-time visibility into storage and infrastructure health, turning operational data into actionable security insights.
“With AI accelerating both the speed and sophistication of cyberattacks, the window to respond has never been smaller,” said Sandeep Singh, senior vice president and general manager, Platform at NetApp. “NetApp is uniquely positioned to make storage an active part of a defence-in-depth strategy.”
David Dalling, GVP, Splunk Security at Cisco, added: “With the new NetApp Splunk SOAR playbook, ONTAP storage becomes an active participant in the security ecosystem, enabling organisations to contain threats directly targeting enterprise data.”
This automation is expected to improve key security metrics such as mean time to contain (MTTC), reduce manual effort, and foster better collaboration between security and storage teams.
New FlexPod solutions power secure AI innovation
Simultaneously, NetApp and Cisco are expanding their proven FlexPod converged infrastructure platform to meet the specific demands of AI workloads. The new validated architectures offer enterprises a simplified, secure, and scalable path to AI adoption across different maturity levels.
The solutions support critical use cases including enterprise AI deployments with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and semantic search, as well as AI inferencing at the edge. They incorporate NetApp’s AI Data Engine (AIDE) for data discovery, preparation, and governance, alongside Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA capabilities for end-to-end security and Zero Trust controls.
FlexPod’s disaggregated storage with NetApp AFF systems allows independent scaling of performance and capacity, while Cisco’s AI networking infrastructure optimises XPU utilisation for faster job completion times.
“As IT teams are tasked with delivering reliable, consistent performance across environments, AI workloads are placing increasing demands on their data infrastructure,” said Dallas Olson, chief commercial officer at NetApp.
Jeremy Foster, GM and SVP at Cisco, emphasised the importance of built-in security: “As organisations move from AI experimentation to real-world deployment, security can’t be an afterthought. It has to be built in from the start.”
The collaboration with NVIDIA further validates these architectures, providing organisations with a secure, AI-ready data foundation that reduces complexity and risk.
