Cloud & Workload Security

Cisco Systems has pushed Splunk AI deeper into private infrastructure with a new Nvidia-backed AI POD built for self-managed and air-gapped environments. The platform, available now, pairs Cisco infrastructure with Nvidia computing and Kubernetes, while Splunk's Tokenomics tool is designed to track AI spending across agents and employee coding tools and estimate future consumption before the billing cycle closes. Cisco is also widening the commercial opportunity beyond the data center after signing a multiyear agreement with Amazon Web Services to jointly develop security products. Cisco said it received $9.3 billion of hyperscaler AI-infrastructure orders during fiscal 2026, equal to roughly 14.7% of its $63.3 billion annual revenue, though orders are not revenue. Cisco shares were up roughly 0.1% at $110.24.

Palantir and Nvidia have reportedly tightened restrictions around Anthropic's advanced AI models over data-retention concerns, with Palantir demanding irrevocable zero-data-retention guarantees before making the models available through its software and Nvidia limiting Claude to less-sensitive internal work. Palantir's September 10 sovereign-AI push with Nvidia uses Nvidia Nemotron open models and customer-controlled infrastructure, while Anthropic said on September 1 it would roll out Enterprise Frontier Safeguards later this fall, storing data in customer-controlled cloud infrastructure with zero-data-retention protections. Microsoft's Sovereign Private Cloud can run large AI models in fully disconnected, customer-controlled environments, a proposition it expanded with Mistral on July 21, though Microsoft also offers Anthropic models across Copilot and Foundry and says Anthropic models used in its online services are excluded from some in-country processing commitments and unavailable in certain sovereign-cloud environments. Palantir's second-quarter U.S. commercial revenue rose 149%, and Insider Monkey tracked 86 hedge funds long PLTR in the second quarter of 2026, down from 96 in the first quarter, while 273 hedge funds held reportable MSFT longs in the second quarter, down from 282. Short positioning is more pointed in Palantir, with 65.13 million shares sold short as of August 31, 3.00% of float, and 2.2 days to cover.

Palantir Technologies, Nvidia and Booz Allen Hamilton could restrict or stop using models from Anthropic and OpenAI unless the companies provide stronger guarantees around customer data and intellectual property, Reuters reported, citing The Information. Palantir has pushed Anthropic for irrevocable zero-data-retention guarantees before making its models available through Palantir software. Nvidia is taking a different approach, reportedly limiting Anthropic models to less sensitive work and using its own Nemotron models for some internal tasks. Booz Allen has also barred employees from using Anthropic's commercial model for proprietary cybersecurity work, as AI labs face more scrutiny over how usage logs and customer information are stored. Microsoft may have an opening, reportedly pitching isolated cloud environments and its own AI products to customers worried about data exposure.

The National Cyber Security Agency, or NCSA, has announced its readiness to drive cloud cybersecurity standards from requirements into real-world implementation, following its CLOUD SECURITY STANDARD: READY TO GO event, which aims to propel Thailand toward a secure and trusted cloud. Held on September 10, 2026, the event drew more than 500 participants from the public sector, private sector, and related parties, joining online and via Facebook Live. Air Vice Marshal Amorn Chomchoey, Secretary-General of the National Cyber Security Agency, said that cloud plays a direct role in driving the country's Data Economy, Digital Economy, and AI, making it necessary to raise security standards in tandem. Major General Teerawut Wittayakorn, Deputy Secretary-General, said that cloud is becoming critical national infrastructure, and that a good standard must serve as a framework for assessing risk, setting controls, and genuinely improving operations. It should not be merely a checklist, but a guardrail that helps organizations see their own risks and gaps. The NCSA also exchanged approaches with the Personal Data Protection Committee, or PDPC, the Digital Government Development Agency, or DGA, and cloud service providers, in order to bring the standard from the policy level down to practice. The agency used the results of advisory assessments conducted under the Cloud Cybersecurity Standard of 2024 to develop mechanisms and prepare readiness ahead of this declaration of intent.

The global cloud security market is projected to grow from USD 34.37 billion in 2026 to USD 59.34 billion by 2031, a CAGR of 11.5%, according to MarketsandMarkets. The firm attributes the expansion to increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, tighter regulatory and data protection requirements, and the growing complexity of multicloud and hybrid IT environments. Within the market, the CNAPP segment is expected to register the highest CAGR, driven by demand for unified protection across application development, cloud infrastructure, and runtime environments, while hybrid cloud is expected to post the highest CAGR by deployment mode. North America is likely to hold the largest market share throughout the forecast period, supported by early cloud adoption, mature digital infrastructure, and the presence of leading vendors, with Asia Pacific the fastest growing region. Key players cited include Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, AWS, Wiz, Zscaler, Fortinet, Akamai, Cloudflare, IBM, CrowdStrike, and SentinelOne.

Visa has unveiled its Singapore Security Roadmap 2026 and Beyond, a comprehensive strategy to strengthen the resilience of Singapore's digital payments ecosystem against evolving fraud, scams, and cyber threats. The roadmap outlines six strategic priorities, including strengthening cybersecurity, advancing authentication, enabling safer transactions through tokenisation, transforming eCommerce checkout experiences, leveraging foundational standards and risk programs, and building a resilient payments ecosystem to combat fraud and scams in the AI era. Visa's study shows that close to seven in 10 Singapore residents trust digital payments, but 42 per cent have encountered scams, with only 8 per cent losing money. To address these threats, Visa is investing in AI-powered fraud detection, tokenisation, and authentication innovations like passkeys and biometrics, deploying over 150 AI and machine learning models globally. The roadmap emphasizes ecosystem-wide collaboration with regulators, financial institutions, merchants, and fintechs to enhance cyber resilience and intelligence sharing.

EPAM Systems has announced a partnership with Wiz, the cloud and AI security platform now owned by Google Cloud, joining the Wiz Partner Alliance to help large organizations turn cloud risk data into engineering fixes. The move comes as EPAM's core business decelerates, with second-quarter revenue growth of only 4.5% and a softer outlook ahead. The partnership pairs Wiz's AI Application Protection Platform with EPAM's engineering capabilities, adding an offensive security layer through its White Hat unit, and builds on existing Wiz implementation work across six industries. Financially, EPAM reported GAAP diluted EPS of $1.97, up 26.3% year over year, and non-GAAP diluted EPS of $3.38, up 22%, while returning $409 million to shareholders through buybacks in the first half of 2026. However, full-year revenue growth guidance is now 3.2% to 4.2%, with third-quarter revenue expected at $1.410 billion to $1.425 billion, implying roughly 1.7% growth at the midpoint, and cash flow turned negative in the first half. The stock trades at a forward P/E of 9.03, reflecting market skepticism despite margin expansion and double-digit EPS growth.

Zscaler reported fiscal second-quarter revenue of $898.2 million, up 24.9% year over year and beating analyst estimates of $877.2 million, while non-GAAP earnings per share of $1.19 surpassed consensus by 9.2%. The company guided third-quarter revenue to $937 million at the midpoint, above expectations, and raised its full-year adjusted EPS guidance to $4.88, beating estimates by 6.1%. Management attributed the strong performance to accelerating adoption of its Zero Trust platform and a surge in AI security bookings, which grew over 50% sequentially. However, shares fell after the announcement, reflecting concerns about sales leadership transitions and integration costs. Zscaler also announced a workforce restructuring affecting about 3% of employees to reallocate resources toward AI initiatives.

Zscaler reported quarterly earnings with revenue up 25% and offered a conservative 2027 outlook, projecting roughly 17% revenue growth versus about 25% in 2026. CEO Jay Chaudhry told Market Domination that AI is a big tailwind, driving demand not only for AI security but for securing everything via zero trust, as agentic AI creates new vulnerabilities. He cited record million-dollar-plus deals and crossing 50% of Fortune 500 companies as customers. Chaudhry expressed bullishness on FY27, saying the company's full AI solutions combined with zero trust architecture will make the year strong.

VAST Data and CrowdStrike have announced new integrations that bring enterprise-grade cybersecurity across AI infrastructure, data, and workloads, marking a first-of-its-kind collaboration. The VAST AI Operating System now natively supports the CrowdStrike Falcon sensor, with deeper integrations planned for Falcon Next-Gen SIEM and Falcon Guardian, CrowdStrike's new AI Detection and Response solution. These integrations aim to protect the infrastructure powering AI, turn data access telemetry into actionable security intelligence, and embed AI-native protection directly into data pipelines. Native Falcon sensor support is certified and available today, while integrations with Falcon Next-Gen SIEM and Falcon Guardian are in private preview. The companies will also demonstrate the integrations within an NVIDIA-powered AI factory.

Netskope Inc reported fiscal second-quarter results with annual recurring revenue rising 27% year-over-year to $899 million, while total revenue grew 29% to $220.5 million, exceeding guidance. The company added $54 million in net new ARR, up 9% year-over-year, and its net revenue retention rate improved to 114%. Gross margin expanded to 77%, and operating margin improved by 11 percentage points to negative 9%, though the company still posted a net loss of $0.03 per share and negative free cash flow of $29.8 million. Netskope reduced its workforce by approximately 5% as part of a shift toward AI-native operations, and it is transitioning customers to annual billings, which temporarily deferred cash collections. The company highlighted strong early traction in its AI security suite, with about one-third of its AI security pipeline already in or entering proof-of-concept phase, and it launched new products including the AI Command Center and DataSet Command Center.

Netskope raised its full-year fiscal 2027 revenue outlook to $888 million to $892 million, up from a prior range of $879 million to $883 million, after reporting second-quarter revenue of $221 million, a 29% year-over-year increase that beat guidance. The company also guided third-quarter revenue to $227 million to $229 million with an operating margin of approximately negative 8%. Annual recurring revenue reached $899 million, up 27% year-over-year, with net new ARR of $54 million and a net retention rate of 114%. Management announced a workforce reduction of about 5% as it shifts spending toward AI infrastructure, and highlighted strong traction from its AI security suite, with roughly one-third of that pipeline already in or entering the proof-of-concept phase. The company ended the quarter with $1.1 billion in cash and marketable securities.

Palo Alto Networks reported fourth-quarter fiscal 2026 non-GAAP earnings of $1.02 per share, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 4.1% and up 7.4% year over year. Revenues climbed 34% to $3.41 billion, topping estimates by 1.8%, driven by strength across Network & AI Security, Cortex, and Idira, with Next-Generation Security ARR jumping 63% to $9.10 billion. Within total revenues, product revenues rose 28.6% to $738 million, accounting for 21.6%, while subscription and support revenues grew 36.2% to $2.672 billion, representing 78.4%. By platform, Network & AI Security contributed $2.331 billion, Cortex $586 million, and Idira $336 million, with other revenues at $157 million. Remaining performance obligations rose 34% to $21.2 billion, and net new NGS ARR reached approximately $970 million, up 98% year over year, with the company adding roughly 220 net new platformizations. Prisma AIRS reached about $120 million in ARR within a year of general availability, XSIAM ARR exceeded $700 million, and observability ARR surpassed $500 million. Non-GAAP gross margin was 74.8%, down from 75.8%, due to a SaaS mix shift, while operating margin slipped to 29.6% from 30.3%. Adjusted free cash flow rose to $1.289 billion. For fiscal 2027, the company forecasts revenues of $14.10-$14.20 billion, NGS ARR of $11.075-$11.175 billion, and non-GAAP EPS of $4.16-$4.19.

Cellebrite DI Ltd. announced that its cloud-based digital evidence management platform, Cellebrite Guardian, has completed an Infosec Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) assessment at the PROTECTED classification level, a milestone supporting adoption by Australian government agencies. The assessment, conducted by CyberCX, an Australian Signals Directorate-endorsed IRAP assessor, provides independent assurance that Guardian can securely handle sensitive workloads for law enforcement, defense, and national security agencies. Philippe Ouimette, Vice President of Sales for Australia and New Zealand, emphasized that the assessment lets agencies move digital evidence to the cloud without compromising security. Cellebrite will assist each agency with internal authorization processes, including security architecture documentation and chain-of-custody records. The company serves over 7,000 global law enforcement agencies and enterprises, accelerating nearly 3 million legally sanctioned investigations annually.

Akamai Technologies has announced a new alliance with Deloitte Canada to support proactive cyber resilience for organizations across North America. The collaboration combines Akamai security products with Deloitte cybersecurity advisory and managed services for enterprise clients. Deloitte, recently recognized as Akamai's North America Services Provider of the Year, plans to use Akamai technology to help simplify client cyber architectures. Akamai, a US IT company with a market cap of about $15.6 billion, provides security, delivery, and cloud computing solutions worldwide. This alliance is part of its security offerings, which focus on helping large clients protect and deliver digital services at scale.

The Financial Stability Board (FSB) has warned that artificial intelligence (AI) technology has become the top risk that could undermine the stability of the global financial system if not properly regulated. In particular, the risk of AI-enabled cyberattacks, which have become significantly cheaper, has narrowed the "window of vulnerability" for financial institutions, as detection and recovery systems cannot keep pace with the speed of attacks. Furthermore, reliance on a few major cloud providers and AI model developers (Big Tech) creates a single point of failure that could have cascading effects on the entire financial market. Meanwhile, the rapid rise in stock prices and assets related to AI has raised concerns about bubbles and sharp corrections, especially when high leverage is used. The FSB calls for international cooperation to regulate AI responsibly and urges financial institutions to shift from reactive to proactive prevention.

CrowdStrike announced new Falcon platform capabilities across Google Cloud's enterprise AI ecosystem to help organizations secure AI applications built on Google Cloud. The company is expanding Falcon Guardian through Google Agent Gateway to provide AI runtime protection, and extending the Falcon platform to Gemini Enterprise through Falcon MCP, Charlotte AI, and Falcon Shield. Additionally, CrowdStrike is building the Falcon platform on regional Google Cloud infrastructure to align with hyperscaler preferences. Daniel Bernard, chief business officer at CrowdStrike, emphasized that organizations shouldn't have to choose between accelerating AI adoption and reducing risk. Brian Goldstein, vice president at Google Cloud, noted that integrating CrowdStrike's AI security capabilities with Gemini Enterprise strengthens native protections for customers scaling enterprise AI on Google Cloud.

Fortanix and CrowdStrike have announced a partnership to secure enterprise AI across the entire lifecycle, combining CrowdStrike's Falcon platform with Fortanix Confidential AI to deliver end-to-end protection from threat detection to safeguarding AI workloads, sensitive data, and proprietary models in memory. The integrated solution addresses the growing risk of AI-powered attacks by detecting and stopping threats while also using confidential computing to create isolated, hardware-protected environments where AI workloads execute, keeping data, prompts, model weights, and inference outputs encrypted even during use. Anuj Jaiswal, Chief Product Officer at Fortanix, and Daniel Bernard, Chief Business Officer at CrowdStrike, both emphasized that the collaboration helps customers deploy AI at enterprise scale with confidence. The companies will showcase their approach at Fal.Con 2026 and co-host the Fortanix Confidential AI Summit on September 2 in Las Vegas.

CrowdStrike Holdings shares jumped 4% to $227.84 in Monday trading after the company opened its Fal.Con 2026 conference with a series of AI-focused announcements, including making its Falcon platform available on Google Cloud and launching Falcon IQ, a new agent stack powered by NVIDIA's open Nemotron models. The company also expanded its Project QuiltWorks data-sharing coalition to ingest real-time data from twelve outside sources, including rival Zscaler, positioning CrowdStrike as the aggregation layer for AI-era cybersecurity. CrowdStrike's fiscal second-quarter 2027 revenue reached $1.47 billion, up 26% year over year, with Falcon Flex annual recurring revenue topping $2.29 billion, up 101%, and management raised its full-year growth outlook by 630 basis points. The stock is up 86% year to date, trading near the analyst target price of $227.58.

Broadcom Inc. announced comprehensive security, identity, and observability capabilities for agentic AI environments running on Private AI Cloud, unveiled at VMware Explore 2026 in Las Vegas. The new offerings—AgentMinder, VMware vDefend, and VMware Avi Load Balancer—provide multi-layer cybersecurity to govern autonomous AI agents, defend workloads, and protect enterprise AI infrastructure. AgentMinder serves as a central control plane for agent identity, intent, and governance, while vDefend extends Zero Trust lateral security to AI workloads, and Avi Load Balancer adds AI-aware load balancing and web application security. These solutions address emerging threats from protocols like Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agent-to-agent (A2A) communications, helping enterprises prevent data exfiltration and reduce cyber risk across AI workloads.

WebRay Security disclosed its 2026 semi-annual report on the evening of August 28. In the first half of the year, it achieved operating revenue of 88.53 million yuan, with research and development investment of 39.95 million yuan, accounting for 45.13% of operating revenue. Despite short-term earnings pressure, the company focused on its integrated space-air-ground security strategy and achieved breakthroughs in four major areas: new AI products, new satellite security business, a new research and manufacturing base, and emerging incremental markets. The company fully advanced its AI Inside strategy, launched the RayToken AI security gateway, upgraded the intelligent capabilities of DayDayMap, and completed AI-driven upgrades of its core products. In the satellite security field, the company laid out integrated satellite-terrestrial intelligent communication security, forming space-air-ground integrated security capabilities covering satellites, links, ground systems, and terminals. In addition, the company planned the construction of an intelligent communication security research and manufacturing base, and explored satellite internet security business opportunities in sectors such as transportation and healthcare.

President Trump signed an emergency order Wednesday that aims to keep some foreign-made transformers and other critical energy equipment out of U.S. electric grids, as reported by Bloomberg. The order generally bars the purchase, importation, or installation of certain foreign-made bulk-power system electrical equipment and associated software where it could pose cybersecurity or operational risks, and sets the stage for potentially new conditions on the continued use of equipment already installed. China accounts for about 80% of the world's battery and solar inverter manufacturing capacity, according to the International Energy Agency, and scores of Chinese large power transformers have been imported into the U.S. over the past decade, per a 2020 Commerce Department investigation. The executive order warned of "certain foreign actors" who are "increasingly creating and exploiting vulnerabilities in the United States bulk-power system." Power utilities and other companies using such equipment are effectively put on notice while the Department of Energy develops rules to implement the ban. Analysts say the move could benefit domestic manufacturers and companies like SolarEdge Technologies, Enphase Energy, and Tesla.

Cisco Systems is expanding its Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, embedding security directly into the AI infrastructure stack to counter rivals Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet. The architecture combines Cisco networking, NVIDIA AI infrastructure, and Supermicro rack-scale compute, with security built from silicon through applications and AI agents. Cisco's security revenues rose 14% year over year to $2.23 billion in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, and firewall orders grew over 30%. The company added more than 6,400 net new customers for products like Secure Access, XDR, Hypershield, and AI Defense since launch. Fortinet's SASE Firewall business grew 34% to over $2 billion in the second quarter of 2026, while Palo Alto's Prisma AIRS surpassed 300 customers in the third quarter of fiscal 2026. Cisco shares are up 44.2% year to date, and the Zacks Consensus Estimate for fiscal 2027 earnings is $5.11 per share, up 7% over the past 30 days.

Palo Alto Networks reported its Network Security business had its strongest quarter in several years during the third quarter of fiscal 2026, driven by rising enterprise spending on AI and cloud infrastructure. Next-generation firewall bookings grew nearly 40% year over year, supported by Gen 5 appliances and AI data center buildouts, while software firewall ARR increased 25% year over year. Network Security accounts for about 70% of total revenues, and hardware revenues, about 10% of total, had their best quarter in a decade with a record backlog. Management expects data center expansion and higher traffic volumes to remain key growth drivers for the next several quarters and potentially several years. Competitors CrowdStrike and Zscaler are also benefiting from AI-related cybersecurity demand, with CrowdStrike's AIDR solution seeing ending ARR grow more than 250% sequentially and Zscaler surpassing 700 Zero Trust Everywhere enterprises.

Anjuna Security announced the availability of its Anjuna Seaglass platform on AMD Secure Virtualization, bringing confidential computing to on-premises data centers with one-click deployment. The platform now runs on AMD EPYC datacenter CPUs with Secure Nested Paging hardware, providing hardware-enforced memory encryption and isolation for containerized workloads without code changes. Enterprises in financial services, healthcare, and government can use the same policy model and attestation workflow across cloud and on-premises environments, with support for air-gapped deployments and compliance alignment with NIST AI RMF, DORA, HIPAA, and GDPR. Anjuna Seaglass on AMD SEV is available now.

Cisco has launched its Sovereign Critical Infrastructure portfolio in Canada, giving government, financial institutions, healthcare, and other critical infrastructure providers greater control and choice over how they run their technology. The portfolio is configurable for on-premises and air-gapped deployment, spanning Cisco's core product lines from routing, switching, and wireless to collaboration and select endpoint devices, enhanced by Cisco and Splunk security and observability solutions. Cisco says it cannot run, access, control, or remotely disable the products, putting control entirely in customers' hands, and the majority of the on-premises portfolio is IPv6-ready, FIPS 140-2/3 certified, and Common Criteria certified. The offering is designed to align with Canadian frameworks like ITSG-33 and is available to order now through Cisco and its partners. Cisco Canada President Raj Juneja said the portfolio gives Canadian organizations a new way to meet their infrastructure control needs, building on three decades of work in the country.