Cisco Identity Services Engine End of Life (EOL) Dates & Support Timeline

Cisco Identity Services Engine lifecycle status — the real story

Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) software per release, from Cisco's per-release End-of-Life bulletins (15 bulletins from the ISE EoS/EoL notice listing, read 2026-09-09 through a fetch proxy because cisco.com bot-blocks plain requests). ISE bulletins phase support differently from the ASA/FTD ones: routine maintenance ends first (after which Cisco publishes only severity-1 and security-vulnerability fixes), then software maintenance releases end altogether, then support ends. Mapping: support = the end of routine maintenance (security-only from then), eol = the end of software maintenance releases (the last day any fix ships), extendedSupport = the end of support. Where a bulletin has no security-only phase (3.1/3.2, 1.2, 1.1, 1.0) support mirrors eol. End-of-Sale and the announcement date are carried where stated. Releases 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5 have release notes but no bulletin yet and are listed as current with no dates; release dates are not stated in the bulletins and are left null.

As read: 3.1 and 3.2 share one bulletin (End-of-Sale and end of maintenance releases 2026-11-03, last date of support 2027-11-30, with ISE 3.1 P10 and 3.2 P8 named as the last maintenance patches); 3.0 ended maintenance releases 2024-07-13 and support 2025-07-13. Hardware appliance bulletins (Secure Network Server 3xx5 series) are not modelled here.

KEV context (CISA catalog 2026.09.08): CVE-2025-20281 and CVE-2025-20337 under 'Identity Services Engine' (both added 2025-07-28), matched on the display name. No version scoping is asserted here.

Verification: cisco.com is bot-blocked for plain fetches, so this file is a frozen manual read; each line links its own bulletin and the notice listing is the index to re-read.

Cisco Identity Services Engine release and support pattern

Of the 18 release lines tracked, 13 are past end of life and 5 are still within support. No end-of-life date is currently published for the 5 supported lines. Upstream also publishes an extended-support phase for 15 lines, shown in the table above.

Computed from the tracked release data at every build — the figures above are the dates in the table, restated, not an editorial estimate.

Cisco Identity Services Engine security intelligence

CISA KEV history: Cisco Identity Services Engine is named in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog 2 times, most recently on 2025-07-28. Derived from CISA's live catalog at every build.

What does Cisco Identity Services Engine end of life mean for your organization?

When a version of Cisco Identity Services Engine reaches end of life, the maintainers stop issuing security patches. Vulnerabilities discovered after this date are publicly disclosed on the National Vulnerability Database, exploit code appears on GitHub, and your systems remain permanently exposed.

The CVE blind spot: Most vulnerability scanners check for known CVEs but do not flag the accumulation of unpatched vulnerabilities in EOL software. With a zero-day, nobody knows about the vulnerability. With EOL software, the vulnerability is public — listed, rated, and often weaponized — but no patch will ever exist. This is the most dangerous gap in enterprise security posture.

Organizations running EOL Cisco Identity Services Engine should treat it as a vulnerability class in their risk register, apply compensating controls (network segmentation, enhanced monitoring, access restriction), and prioritize migration to a supported version.

Your options when Cisco Identity Services Engine reaches end of life

There are four realistic paths. Which one is right depends far more on how long the system needs to keep running than on the version you are on today.

How to choose, in one question: how many more years does this system need to run? Under a year, extended support (where it exists) is usually cheaper than an emergency migration. One to three years, migrate — support purchased repeatedly costs more than doing the project once, and the project only gets harder as the version ages. Indefinitely, migrate now and plan the next migration before it surprises you.

Worth saying plainly, because vendors selling extended support rarely will: extended support is often the more expensive choice over a multi-year horizon. It is the right answer when a deadline is genuinely unreachable, not as a default. Compare the annual fee against the one-time cost of migrating before committing to either.

Formalizing decisions like this across your estate? Our free EOL policy template is a ready-to-adopt policy with risk tiers, remediation SLAs, and audit mapping — no signup, free to use and share.

Extended Support Options

If you cannot migrate immediately, extended support vendors provide continued security patches for EOL Cisco Identity Services Engine versions. This is a bridge, not a permanent solution — plan your migration in parallel.

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