Palo Alto Network is helping turn 5G into a highly secured network

Huzefa Motiwala, Director - Systems Engineering for India & SAARC, Palo Alto Networks

“5G promises a completely transformative mobility through the entire enhanced mobile broadband experience. We firmly believe that the way it is going to be delivered is very different, in terms of, right from distributed computing, multi edge computing to the core network. From our perspective, Palo Alto Networks is bringing our many years of securing the network experience, the network cloud and devices to the 5G world. We are trying to enable the service providers and enterprises to turn 5G into a highly secured network. So in the process, we are offering a few solutions and these are all industry firsts - one is the entire 5G stack infra which is built on Cloud native architecture. So we have inbuilt containerized 5G security which is designed to secure this highly distributed 5G network, which includes the edge cloud, and, of course, multi-vendor & multi cloud. The second thing which we are bringing to the table is the real time correlation of threats to the 5G subscriber and 5G equipment. Real time correlation of threats can actually help identify which subscriber or which device or machine might be the target of an attack. This in a way helps in the complete forensic and accelerated investigation; this is unique because you are going right to the last mile to identify the threat, which is not possible in today's world.

The third piece is, because natively the 5G networks are allowing service providers to offer a dedicated end-to-end piece of the entire network, so the service provider who is using this backbone 5G infra can completely secure this and offer a dedicated end-to-end piece of network.  

We believe in protecting the end-to-end 5G infra across all layers, locations (distributed, cloud native, multi-cloud architecture), and this single platform helps gain a lot of context driven security to the most granular level for the entire 5G infra. it is also generating a revenue stream for the service providers, because they can now upsell security offerings on top of their connectivity to the customer, to provide the security as a service offering.”