Cisco to link all future products to its SaaS-y Cloud Control management tool

Cisco is set to integrate all its future products with the Cloud Control management platform, its SaaS-y management tool that offers network administrators a single interface to manage all its devices and software. The company launched Cloud Control in June 2025, initially making it available to customers in the United States only.

However, Cisco appears to have resolved privacy and regulatory concerns that were slowing the rollout to other markets. Jeff Schultz, Cisco's senior vice president for portfolio strategy and marketing, announced that Cloud Control will be available in the European Union, the UK, Australia in February 2027, followed by Japan, India, and Canada in May.

Schultz said Cisco is "working tirelessly" to deploy the platform globally as quickly as possible. He also revealed that Cisco will stop shipping products that don't integrate with Cloud Control starting next year. This decision reflects Cisco's belief that the main barrier to customers purchasing more of its products is the complexity of managing them together.

Schultz also sees Cloud Control as a "platform advantage" for the company, as it improves manageability and resilience when used in conjunction with networking, security, and observability tools. Cisco will bundle its Thousand Eyes observability and security tool with the "Essentials" and "Advantage" licenses, and automatically deploy it with Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 hardware.

Additionally, Cisco plans to bring Live Protect, a tool that implements compensating controls for unpatchable vulnerabilities, to more customers starting in December. This will include 8000 series routers, secure firewalls, campus gateways, Cloud Control itself, and from May 2027, ASR 9000 series service aggregation routers and Network Convergence System.