Cell World Congress 2026: AI-powered Community Safety
At this 12 months’s Cell World Congress in Barcelona, service suppliers confirmed up from world wide to hitch over 115,000 attendees from 210 nations. With greater than 3,000 exhibitors, sponsors, and companions on-site, the occasion showcased a transformative array of applied sciences—from the primary sensible purposes of 6G and industrial IoT to autonomous, unified safety for an AI-native future.
Watch FNTV interview from the SOC
This marked the second 12 months of the mixed Safety and Community Operations Middle (S/NOC) on the world’s largest mobility and community convention. We leveraged the teachings realized from earlier SOC deployments, including the brand new Safe Firewall 6160, which is designed particularly for AI-ready information facilities.
Cisco’s S/NOC targeted on innovation, unveiling a collection of next-generation options, together with AI-driven predictive networking and autonomous safety operations. Our high-profile media bulletins and reside demonstrations of clever wi-fi infrastructure underscored a steadfast dedication to defining the subsequent period of world digital communications.
The “One Cisco” technique reached its full potential on the world stage, seamlessly unifying networking, safety, observability, and Splunk’s data-driven insights to ship unparalleled enterprise outcomes. This holistic strategy demonstrated precisely how our prospects can construct sovereign, AI-ready information facilities, optimize hyper-distributed workplaces, and obtain complete digital resilience in an more and more complicated panorama.
The core missions of the S/NOC at MWC 2026 have been:
- Defend: Safeguarding the community from inside and exterior threats.
- Educate: Participating attendees by way of immersive SOC excursions, insightful weblog content material, and our newest white paper.
- Innovate: Growing and implementing new integrations, workflows, and automations to set the usual for the longer term.
Investigative Workflow
The firewall and Safe Entry DNS logs have been despatched to Splunk Cloud because the S / NOC platform. Detections from safety occasions have been correlated in XDR for Incident era; and Tier 1 triage / Tier 2 investigation. From tons of of hundreds of alerts, dozens of Incidents have been created for investigation, ranked by precedence / affect. The beta Agentic AI ‘On the spot Assault Storyboard’ was used to assist triage Incidents, for instance this Excel file despatched within the clear contained an embedded PDF file, a standard method to compromise networks in a phishing assault.
The High AI Suggestions included File Evaluation for affirmation. The Tier 1 / Tier 2 analysts have been empowered to pivot into Safe Malware Analytics to examination the file.
Evaluation of the file decided it was not malicious however was a leak of confidential data in clear textual content over the community.
The analyst in XDR had the power to finish the Incident investigation or escalate for a deeper look in Splunk Enterprise Safety (ES) by a Tier 3 Risk Hunter/Incident Responder. The worklog of the XDR analyst, AI generated report and Observables (IP addresses, hash values, consumer information, and so forth.), have been mechanically despatched to Splunk ES for Investigation, with a easy standing change in XDR.
You possibly can learn extra about this bi-directional integration within the weblog from the SOC crew at Cisco Stay EMEA 2026 simply two weeks prior.
The Statistics
Statistics are at all times a preferred a part of the SOC discussions. Beneath are the stats from this 12 months’s occasion.
| 12 months | 2026 |
|---|---|
| Attendees (MWC) | 104,497 |
| Complete logs captured (Splunk) | 580 million |
| Complete distinctive gadgets (Firewall in Splunk) | 40,075 |
| Complete logs written to cloud (Splunk) | 4.3 TBs |
| Peak bandwidth utilization (Firewall) | 3.5 Gbps |
| DNS Requests (Cisco Safe Entry) | 245.5 million / 45.7k would have been blocked |
| Recordsdata despatched for malware evaluation (Firewall) | 5 despatched to Safe Malware Analytics Recordsdata have been in comparison with a recognized file database previous to submission |
SOC Findings and Classes Realized
Dive deeper into the innovation and technical particulars with the next blogs, written instantly by the engineers on the bottom within the MWC SOC:
Acknowledgements
Our appreciation to the engineers whose experience made the first Cell World Congress 2026 SNOC a hit.
Community Operations Middle Liaisons
Cisco Safety and Splunk SOC Staff
- Splunk Enterprise Integrations: Christian Cloutier, with Ivan Berlinson
- Firewall / Cloud Management: Christopher Grabowski, with Adam Kilgore
- Consumer Safety Suite / DNS: Apostolos Kouloukourgiotis
- XDR / Duo Listing: Adi Sankar
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