Qualys has announced its participation as a launch partner in Cisco Cloud Control Studio, a new platform designed for agentic IT and security operations. This collaboration aims to integrate Qualys' risk intelligence directly into Cisco's operational workflows, allowing joint customers to manage and remediate vulnerabilities more efficiently. The integration was unveiled at Cisco Live Las Vegas 2026.
The partnership focuses on addressing the challenges posed by rapidly evolving threats and expanding attack surfaces, where the speed of vulnerability exploitation is nearing the speed of discovery. The sheer volume of security alerts often overwhelms human teams, highlighting the need for AI-driven agents that can observe, reason, and act at machine speed while keeping humans involved for critical decisions. Cisco Cloud Control Studio is built to facilitate these "agentic" operations.
Cisco Cloud Control Studio serves as a unified platform that brings together networking, security, AI infrastructure, observability, and collaboration. It provides a single environment for IT and security teams to investigate and resolve issues, with AI agents working alongside human operators. The platform's integration hub utilizes the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard, to enable secure data access and actions from external systems like Qualys.
Qualys contributes its extensive asset and vulnerability intelligence platform to the Cisco ecosystem. This includes capabilities for unified asset discovery and inventory across diverse environments, AI-speed vulnerability detection, and hyper-prioritization of risks using its TruRisk scoring system. TruRisk considers factors such as threat intelligence, active exploitation, asset criticality, misconfigurations, and business context to help security teams focus on the most significant threats.
Furthermore, Qualys offers autonomous remediation and zero-day mitigation through its Qualys Eliminate solution. This allows for patching and remediation at machine speed once a critical vulnerability is identified and validated. For situations where immediate patching is not feasible, Qualys can provide guidance on compensating mitigation actions to reduce exposure.
The integration works by Qualys exposing its intelligence via a managed MCP server. Cisco's AI agents can then directly query Qualys for information such as asset inventory, vulnerability detections, TruRisk scores, and exploit context. These agents can also trigger remediation or mitigation workflows within Qualys.
Within Cisco AI Canvas, a collaborative environment for operators and AI agents, this integration enables a continuous workflow. When an investigation begins, AI agents query Qualys to assess an asset's inventory status, vulnerability, exposure, criticality, and potential blast radius. This information is correlated with other Cisco signals, such as network telemetry and identity data, to confirm risk.
Once risk is confirmed, the same integration allows the AI agents to initiate a Qualys remediation or mitigation workflow, eliminating the need for manual intervention across multiple tools. Security is maintained through scoped access controls, where Qualys credentials are not exposed to the agent, and permissions are defined by tenant and role (read or write). All interactions are logged to provide a comprehensive audit trail.
The partnership positions Qualys as providing the depth of asset visibility and risk intelligence, while Cisco Cloud Control offers the operational framework to act upon that intelligence. This synergy aims to enable organizations to move from simply receiving security alerts to executing risk-minded responses at an accelerated pace.
