Cisco wants Teleport to help it bring infrastructure identity everywhere.
Cisco is continuing to embed identity management capabilities deeper into its product portfolio by teaming with Teleport, a security vendor headquartered in Oakland, Calif., that’s focused on identity-based infrastructure access management.
Cisco is investing in and partnering with Teleport as part of its efforts to bring infrastructure identity everywhere, Matt Caulfield, vice president of product and identity at Cisco, told Network World. “We have this whole premise that identity needs to be a fundamental property of infrastructure, whether it’s human, machine or agent, and we need to kind of usher in this new era of infrastructure identity.”
Teleport’s Infrastructure Identity Platform offers unified identity and access management for all components of advanced enterprise infrastructure, including humans, machines, AI agents, and structures. It promises access-control support for servers, server clusters, databases, AI agents, and the people running those systems, said Ev Kontsevoy, CEO of Teleport.
The companies did not say how much Cisco’s investment is worth.
“Today, far more than employees touch infrastructure. Workloads and automation act continuously, while AI agents can now make decisions at machine speed. The identity problem is no longer confined to a person logging into an application. It extends to every actor that can reach something valuable,” wrote Peter Bailey, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s security business, and Kontsevoy in a joint blog post.
“The enterprise identity surface was already growing before AI. Cloud and automation created more machine actors with access to critical systems. AI now accelerates both sides of the problem: it introduces autonomous agents that can act across infrastructure, while giving attackers the speed to discover and exploit identity gaps that teams once had time to find themselves. Ambiguous identity, broad access, and standing privilege are no longer background risk. They are active paths to critical systems,” Bailey and Kontsevoy wrote.
Together, the vendors can bring identity context closer to where action happens, the pair wrote: “Cisco has always operated where the enterprise connects. That position matters because the network sees connections, while identity reveals the actors behind them. Teleport completes the picture by replacing secret-based access with short-lived, identity-native access that leaves a clear session record.”
Non-human identity has always been a problem, and now AI agents are the catalyst to solve that problem, Caulfield said. “Agents have taken us to the brink, where I think the industry is waking up to the fact that we do need to solve identity. And to solve agent identity, we have to solve machine workload identity. And it kind of ties all this together,” Caulfield said. “So agentic, yes, is the catalyst, but we’re actually seizing that opportunity to solve it for the entire stack.”
In describing how Teleport’s technology works, Kontsevoy said that conceptually, it brings a new layer into enterprise infrastructure.
“It is an identity layer. It keeps track of everyone and everything involved in computing. So, once you got your Teleport installed, or you got a Teleport account, you start enrolling your infrastructure into it,” Kontsevoy said. “So, every server gets an identity. Every laptop gets an identity. Every workload like a microservice or database, they get issued an identity. Every agent, every network switch, gets an identity.”
Kontsevoy pointed out a consumer example of this approach that many people use every day: Apple’s device management features. “If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, that’s how Apple manages all of your devices. If you go to your Apple ID and you click on ‘All My Apple Devices,’ you’re going to see your MacBook, you’re going to see your iWatch, you’re going to see your iPhone, your everything.”
On Cisco’s part, the company will start to embed the Teleport technology within its products portfolio.
“As we build out this kind of future where identity is a property of the infrastructure, where every switch, router, server, virtual machine has a strong identity on the network, we can then use that to do things like securing how workloads talk to each other, securing how humans talk to workloads, securing how a human accesses a switch or a piece of infrastructure,” Caulfield said.
Cisco’s security moves
The Teleport agreement is the latest example of Cisco’s efforts to build out its identity management capabilities. In June, Cisco acquired Astrix Security for its security platform that specializes in identifying, managing, and securing AI agents and non-human identities, such as machine-to-machine connections.
In July, Cisco snapped up WideField Security for its identity lifecycle security and telemetry, including information about credentials, sessions, identities and activity. Cisco is integrating it into Splunk’s Agentic SOC platform.
In May 2025, Cisco introduced Duo Identity and Access Management (IAM), extending its Duo platform beyond its traditional MFA/access-security roots toward a broader, identity-security platform.
“Duo Agentic Identity builds on Duo Directory to provide a foundational directory where agents are registered as distinct identity objects—not service accounts, not proxies of their human operators,” wrote Caulfield, wrote in a March 2026 blog post. “Each agent is mapped to a human owner, assigned to groups for policy enforcement, authenticated at access and fully logged from the moment it is onboarded. The result: Every action is traceable to a sponsor. And when an agent’s work is done, lifecycle visibility gives your team the confidence to know that access has been removed.”
