CDW and Cisco Help Organizations Build Scalable, AI-Ready Infrastructure

Artificial intelligence is transforming how organizations approach infrastructure and cybersecurity, causing them to shift from reactive defense to proactive, intelligent operations. As the global economy transitions from AI assistants to AI-native solutions, we’ve reached an inflection point. This new reality demands greater agility, stronger security, smarter collaboration and infrastructure that scales with innovation.

To get there, organizations must move beyond static, single-purpose environments to flexible, resilient platforms that support a wide range of AI workloads. Whether experimental or in production, these workloads must deliver high performance and low-latency reliability. Building observable, autonomous infrastructure adds complexity, requiring deep visibility across compute, storage and security domains. That visibility reduces manual effort and human error, ultimately accelerating operations.

Complementary tools within Cisco’s AI ecosystem serve specific purposes across the AI lifecycle, including shortening mean time to resolution (MTTR) so that IT teams can focus on strategic problem-solving. These include Cisco AI Canvas, AI Defense and AI PODS.

Cisco AI Canvas brings real-time telemetry and AI-driven insights into a single, intelligent workspace. As Cisco’s first generative user interface for cross-domain IT, Canvas simplifies multistep diagnostics and accelerates resolution by bringing data into a shared workflow. It reduces the fragmentation that often slows down IT operations as teams attempt to correlate data across multiple systems. AI Canvas breaks down those silos by providing unified, cross-domain visibility that continuously ingests live data from network devices, security tools and application performance monitors.

In addition, the dynamic user interface of Canvas adapts based on situational context. When a team investigates a network performance issue, the interface automatically surfaces relevant metrics and recommends remediation methods.

AI Canvas incorporates Cisco’s decades of expertise into a deep network model refined by live telemetry and insights from Cisco’s Technical Assistance Center. The model powers AI agents that assist with issue investigation and offer solutions in natural language while keeping humans in the loop. This approach reduces MTTR, allowing operators to focus on higher-value tasks.

Cisco’s AI PODS and AI Defense accelerate AI deployment and strengthen enterprise security against emerging threats from malicious AI agents. 

AI PODS are pre-validated, modular AI infrastructures that can reduce deployment timelines by about 50%. They integrate Cisco compute, Nvidia GPUs and a lossless network, with unified management through Cisco Intersight and Nexus Dashboard. Customers can start with smaller GPUs and expand as needed. This modularity eliminates lengthy integration cycles, enabling AI initiatives to move beyond pilot phases more quickly.

Meanwhile, Cisco AI Defense actively discovers workloads and applications across distributed environments, gathering telemetry to identify vulnerabilities in seconds. It helps organizations protect production AI and defend against malicious AI through embedded network guardrails that block potential attacks and data leakage in real time. Such speed is critical for applications, where low MTTR is essential.

CDW uses Cisco AI PODs, Cisco Modeling Labs and our own AI and automation tools to help customers attain validated, AI-ready infrastructure quickly. Rather than treating each initiative as a custom build, CDW leverages the PODs’ pre-engineered designs as repeatable infrastructure patterns that can deploy across use cases. This approach supports training, inference and optimization in a wide range of enterprise environments. By leveraging Cisco infrastructure, CDW can rapidly model customer environments and ensure outcomes are consistent and aligned to specific requirements.

CDW’s commitment to using AI internally improves delivery speed and customer outcomes while demonstrating how we apply AI in solution design, validation and delivery. Our field-tested guidance helps customers accelerate adoption and avoid common pitfalls.

The partnership between Cisco and CDW exemplifies what’s possible when technical innovation meets real-world expertise. Cisco delivers AI-ready infrastructure and operational tools, while CDW provides the services and support to implement them effectively in complex environments. Together, we offer a blueprint for AI adoption that’s secure, scalable and grounded in practical experience.