Taking Security To The Edge - Cisco N9300 Smart Switches
- Apr 27
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 28
Today’s enterprise data centres are undergoing rapid transformation as business requirements evolve, applications grow more complex and user expectations increase. Many organisations are adopting hybrid approaches to gain flexibility and reduce costs. This means workloads are no longer confined to traditional environments. While this shift improves scalability, it also introduces new operational and security challenges. Making it essential to rethink how critical systems and applications are protected.
Modern data centres now span private clouds, public clouds, and colocation facilities, forming highly distributed and complex environments. Managing multiple point solutions each with its own tools and interfaces increases the likelihood of misconfigurations. Along with inconsistent policy enforcement and potential breaches. At the same time, organisations must continue to prioritise agility and cost efficiency to support dynamic application scaling.
A new approach to integrating security into the network
As data centres continue to evolve, the underlying infrastructure must also advance. To address the increasing demand for scalability, security, and efficiency, a new generation of smart switching technology has emerged. These switches incorporate programmable data processing units (DPUs) which enables advanced services to run directly within the network fabric. This approach simplifies architecture, boosts performance, and improves cost efficiency.
Enhanced capabilities with integrated processing
By embedding DPUs into switching platforms, traditional network devices are transformed into powerful multifunctional systems capable of hosting services at scale. These processors handle complex workloads efficiently by extending functionality far beyond basic networking.
With high-performance silicon at their core, these switches deliver fast connectivity, detailed telemetry, encryption at line rate, and improved energy efficiency. The addition of DPUs enables substantial service throughput and supports a wide range of capabilities. This includes segmentation, network address translation, encryption, intrusion detection and protection against distributed denial-of-service attacks.
This design also improves performance by intelligently directing traffic between the switching hardware and the processing units. Reducing latency compared to conventional architectures. At the same time, it lowers costs by consolidating hardware, reducing power consumption, minimising rack space usage and simplifying operations.
Built-in intelligent security
Security is now embedded directly into the switching platform through an AI-driven architecture that enables advanced segmentation across the entire data centre. Centralised management tools allow security teams to define, test and deploy policies consistently across network types.
Operational management remains streamlined through dedicated platforms that handle networking, processing and policy workflows. This separation ensures that both network operations and security teams can work efficiently within their respective domains while maintaining shared visibility.
By combining these management systems, organisations gain a unified view of both network and security operations. This integration improves collaboration, simplifies troubleshooting and supports a scalable infrastructure capable of adapting to modern application demands.
Key benefits of integrated security
This approach delivers several important advantages:
Automated policy management: AI-driven systems can create, refine, and enforce security policies based on application behaviour. Reducing the need for manual intervention.
Safe and continuous updates: New policies can be tested in simulated environments before deployment, minimising disruption and ensuring reliability.
Role-based operations: Separate workflows for network and security teams improve efficiency while maintaining coordinated oversight.
Optimised traffic handling: Security is applied inline without compromising routing efficiency or performance.
Consistent enforcement: Policies can be applied uniformly across different environments, including cloud platforms and on-premises systems.
Practical use cases
These smart switches can be deployed across a range of scenarios:
Cloud edge security: By combining networking and security functions, they remove bottlenecks and eliminate single points of failure. This improves scalability and resilience.
Segmentation across zones: Automated policies replace complex firewall setups, ensuring consistent protection without added overhead.
Data centre interconnect security: Integrated capabilities streamline connectivity between sites while maintaining uniform policy enforcement.
Top-of-rack deployments: Security is applied directly at each connection point. This enables high-performance protection throughout the network.
Across all these use cases, centralised tools provide full visibility into operations. Ensuring high availability, seamless failover, and reliable policy deployment. This allows organisations to strengthen security while minimising downtime and operational complexity.
At Networks Revived we have experienced many scenarios where this technology could have become useful. We've have previous customer whom have difference ESXI hosts and storage from production and non production work loads. Naturally over time, there becomes a requirement for these workloads to communicate. We have to segment the traffic for security and operational reasons.
A previously solution to this is to hairpin traffic via a connected firewall. Doing so increases the latency along the path due to additional hops. Now with the introduction of the port based L4 firewall, this allows inspection to be performed much faster.
Flexible deployment options
Organisations can adopt this technology in different ways depending on their environment. It can be introduced gradually into existing infrastructures or deployed alongside new systems from the start. This flexibility supports both incremental upgrades and full-scale transformations.
The future of data centre security
By embedding intelligent hardware-accelerated security directly into the network, this new approach redefines how data centres are protected. It simplifies operations, enhances performance, enables scalable and automated security without relying on complex architectures.
Through deep integration and intelligent automation, modern switching platforms provide a cost effective and future ready solution. Helping organisations build secure, agile and high performing data centre environments.
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