Cisco AI Defense vs Noma Security

Cisco AI Defense is Cisco's security product for enterprise AI applications, models and agents. Cisco unveiled it on January 15, 2025 and said it would be available that March. It is built on Robust Intelligence, the AI security startup Cisco announced it would acquire on August 26, 2024 and finished acquiring on September 24, 2024; Dark Reading called Robust Intelligence the core component of AI Defense. The product is sold by Cisco Systems, Inc., which was incorporated in 1984 and is based in San Jose; this profile lists Cisco's founding year and headquarters, as the directory does for other big-company products. Cisco's May 2026 data sheet splits the product into four parts. AI Cloud Visibility discovers AI models, applications, connected data sources, MCP servers and agents, including assets in Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex and Azure AI Foundry. AI Supply Chain Risk Management scans model files, repositories and MCP servers and tools, and gives each asset a risk score. AI Model and Application Validation runs algorithmic red teaming with more than 200 attack techniques and threat subcategories. AI Runtime Protection applies safety, security and privacy guardrails, enforces MCP policies at runtime and protects agent behavior. Runtime checks can run at the network level through Cisco Multicloud Defense, through a gateway, or through an Inspection API. Hybrid deployments (AWS EKS, Azure AKS, GCP and on-premises AI PODs on OpenShift) keep sensitive data in the customer's environment. A separate AI Access module, for employee use of third-party AI apps, comes through Cisco Secure Access and needs its Advantage package. **Agent and MCP security** In February 2026 Cisco added an AI bill of materials, an MCP Catalog, multi-turn red teaming of models and agents, real-time agentic guardrails and an integration with NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails; the release gave no availability dates. In March 2026 it launched AI Defense: Explorer Edition, a self-service red-teaming tool Cisco offers at no upfront cost, and announced an Agent Runtime SDK for Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Google Vertex Agent Builder, Azure AI Foundry and LangChain, plus DefenseClaw, an open-source agent security framework. **Frameworks** Cisco says AI Defense has mapped to NIST, OWASP and MITRE frameworks since launch. Its data sheet names the NIST AI RMF, MITRE ATLAS and the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, and red-team reports also map to Cisco's own Integrated AI Security and Safety Framework. We found no documented support for the EU AI Act or ISO 42001. **Who it's for** Large enterprises that already use Cisco security products (Secure Access, Multicloud Defense, Splunk) and want AI discovery, red teaming and runtime guardrails from one vendor. Cisco doesn't publish prices.

Noma Security is a security and governance platform for AI agents and the wider AI lifecycle. It was founded in 2023 by Niv Braun (CEO) and Alon Tron (CTO), who met in the Israel Defense Forces' 8200 intelligence unit. Its contact page lists a single office, in New York, and its development center is in Tel Aviv. Noma has raised $132 million: a $7 million seed round led by Glilot Capital Partners and a $25 million Series A led by Ballistic Ventures, announced together when it came out of stealth (reported October 31, 2024), and a $100 million Series B led by Evolution Equity Partners in July 2025, with Ballistic and Glilot taking part. Databricks Ventures made an undisclosed investment in June 2025, alongside a partnership with Databricks. The platform has four products. AI-SPM finds agents, MCP servers, skills, models and tools across cloud platforms, SaaS platforms, code repositories and endpoints (through existing EDR or MDM tools), and flags misconfigurations such as excessive agency, unsandboxed agents and secrets in agent instructions. It also scans models from open registries such as Hugging Face for malicious artifacts, hidden instructions and known vulnerabilities, and assesses MCP servers for supply chain risk. Agent Access Control defines which agents are approved, what data they can reach and what actions they can take. AI-DR monitors agent sessions at runtime for prompt injection (including indirect injection through tool responses), data leakage, tool poisoning and scope violations; it can alert, block, mask data inline, steer the agent, require human approval or stop it with a kill switch. AI Red Teaming runs multi-turn attack campaigns against apps and agents, including in CI/CD pipelines, and feeds findings into runtime policies. Policies are enforced through agent hooks, AI and MCP gateways, agent SDKs and APIs. Noma covers SaaS agents built in Microsoft Copilot Studio and Salesforce Agentforce, and homegrown agents on Amazon Bedrock, Azure AI Foundry and Databricks or built with LangChain and CrewAI. Since February 2026 it has been available through the Extended plan of AWS Security Hub, covering Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker workloads. **AI compliance coverage** Noma says its AI-SPM and red-teaming findings map to the NIST AI RMF, the EU AI Act and ISO 42001, as well as the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs and MITRE ATLAS, and its red-teaming product offers these frameworks as compliance presets. A UiPath case study on its site says Noma's scanning supported UiPath's ISO/IEC 42001:2023 certification. We found no published control-by-control mappings. **Who it's for** Large enterprises with many AI agents across endpoints, SaaS and cloud that want one security layer from discovery to runtime. Noma says it is used by more than 10% of the Fortune 100, and testimonials on its site come from people at UiPath, Kantar, Best Buy, Nielsen and Endor Labs.