Why Security Will Gain More Importance for Telecoms of Tomorrow

By Zia Askari

With an ever increasing rate of low cost handsets, smartphone and tablets adoption in India, telecom infrastructure and services are becoming an integral part of a large set of individuals as well as any business today. This is putting great amount of pressure on telecoms of tomorrow to ensure that their networks are completely secure.

Moreover, as we move ahead towards the era of - the Internet of Things (IoT), M2M communications, Power Grids, Municipal Wi-Fi all these entities will rely on secured networks. The most precious assets of any business (data, voice, and communications) flow over the network and as voice, data and communications flow, there is always the risk of theft or interception.

Giving his opinion on the increasing importance of security for telecoms, Michael Ritter, VP-Technical Marketing, ADVA Optical Networking, says, “The fierce growth in cybercrime and the increased proliferation of network-hacking has left networks at greater risk than ever before. Cybercriminals are demonstrating a higher degree of collaboration and technical competency than ever before, resulting in increased plans for protection and regulation around the collection, storage and use of information along with severe penalties. The wide-scale adoption of cloud services in almost all industry verticals introduces additional threats originating from third-party service providers.”

Speaking about this issue, Yuval Illuz, General Manager, Cyber Solutions, ECI Telecom LTD, explains, that the threat of hacking and security breaches continues to grow.

“Attacks are becoming more sophisticated and targeted and cyber criminals and terrorists, more wily and calculated. The potential consequences of a successful cyber-attack are staggering, ranging from “just” a barred website to complete cities without power. Telecoms touch nearly everything and everyone. For this reason, operators must design secure infrastructures that ensure complete functionality, business as usual.” He adds on.

Talking about the role being played by ECI Telecom, Yuval Illuz, says that, with long term experience in mission critical networks, ECI understands the risks from both IT and connectivity  perspective.

This experience has led ECI to offer those measures with highest impact. As a result, over the years, ECI has been repeatedly chosen by strategic industries and mission critical customers to provide solutions which ensure secure, global communications.

“With the proliferation of cyber warfare, ECI is leveraging its telecom expertise to bring the industry an impressively comprehensive, elastic, cyber security solution. LightSec™ combines ECI's networking security expertise with best of bread components from well-known industry leaders (like Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.). LightSec includes multiple security engines, hardware and software based, aggregated into one single dashboard – a virtual one stop shop. For example, the solution can include an NFV card, which enables customers to upgrade and add security services remotely. The solution can be off the shelf or tailored to offer a variety of security applications, including: L2 anomaly detection, L2/L3 encryption, network anomaly detection, big data cyber analytics, strong authentication, DDOS protection, firewall and SCADA FW, NAT and DPI. Bottom-line, LightSec is a holistic and robust protection suite which protects the entire infrastructure of an organization - layers 1 through 7.

It features the LightSec Viewer (LightSec-V™), a web-based multi-vendor threat management system for visualization and management of cyber solutions specifically for SOC (Security Operation Center) or senior management.  This provides a centralized and aggregated view of threat analysis, whether detected by LightSec or 3^rd party applications,” he explains.

Talking about the security portfolio from ADVA, Michael Ritter says, “Our ADVA ConnectGuard™ security portfolio is designed for maximum security and highest transmission performance. While ADVA ConnectGuard™ Optical network encryption technology is optimized for data center interconnection applications requiring maximum data security on the network when connecting dispersed locations, ADVA ConnectGuard™ Ethernet enables the transformation of traditional Ethernet leased lines into secure and encrypted connectivity.”

Security Trends 

In today’s scenario, hackers and cyber terrorists are becoming increasingly calculated. Gone are the days of using the same typical attacks over and over again – as these are usually addressed quite well by most of the signature based tools.

Attackers seem to be taking a longer-term more strategic view of their victims. Advanced Persistent Threats (APT), like Zero Day Attacks, are beginning to dominate the landscape of many of our customers.

“ECI strongly believes that the best way to address these new threats is by using behavioral analysis solutions, such as Network/End-Point/SCADA anomaly detection and big data cyber analytics. These types of tools can be used to study user / network elements / workstations behavior, identify anomalies from the base-line, and raise a flag when irregular or unusual behavior is detected. Other common threats to telecom networks include attacks on the service availability (e.g. DDoS attack) and on traffic confidentiality (e.g. line tapping).  ECI’s cyber security solution provides holistic protection at all layers of the OSI model (L1-L7), and even at Layer 8 – detecting anomalies in user behavior and even thru the application usages,” Yuval Illuz from ECI Telecom explains.

As per the views from Michael Ritter from ADVA Optical Networking, “Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are a core structural change in the way telecommunication infrastructure gets deployed. It will bring significant changes in the way applications are delivered. The resulting architecture presents service provider security teams with inherent challenges, increasing the complexity and effort required to secure sensitive data when in motion.” He adds on.

Conclusion

Moving forward, as telecom operators increase on their network strain, with more and more applications, around data, voice and video – it will become even more critical for these future networks to weave an affective web of security cutting across multiple layers of their network, and completely securing their customer segments.