Fortinet secures the path to 5G
February 2019, Cyber Security, IT infrastructure

Fortinet recently announced extensive capabilities for securing the path to 5G with its solutions for mobile core networks and cloud infrastructures, including its virtual SPU technology and advanced security and high-performance systems.

With the promise for faster connection speeds, massive connectivity scale, and new revenue opportunities, 5G will have a profound impact on mobility and digital transformation.

“With 5G, mobile infrastructure’s end-to-end innovation will continue to transform into a platform and catalyst for value creation and service innovation. Throughout this transformation, Fortinet’s security architecture and solutions provide advanced security for multiple LTE, LTE-A, and 5G use cases to help secure mobile infrastructures, from radio access network (RAN) to the telco cloud, and offers customers carrier-grade performance and capacity with cloud-grade scalability, visibility, and control,” says John Maddison, executive vice president, products and solutions, Fortinet.

The advent of 5G will extend a digital connection to almost every facet of our lives. In many of the somewhat futuristic-sounding new use cases, such as autonomous vehicles, AR/VR immersive experiences, smart cities, ultralow latency, bandwidth, and speed, delivery has been the missing puzzle piece. For years now, the mobile interconnection of all these things seemed inevitable, yet the massive density of connections, all with adequate speed, latency and related services, had so far remained unachievable in all but limited proof-of-concept testing.

With 5G and the impending orders-of-magnitude advances in bandwidth, connection and use case possibilities, there is opportunity for end-to-end innovation as the mobile infrastructure is transformed into a platform and a catalyst for value creation and service innovation. More than ever, mobile network providers will become secure business enablers.

For example, service providers will have new revenue generating opportunities in IoT, such as manufacturing automation, industrial telemetry, emergency response systems, robotic surgery, 4K UHD video streaming, and more. However, these innovations will also bring a corresponding increase in the potential havoc wrought by denial of service, advanced threats and other forms of cyberattack on the core network infrastructure itself. Security is an imperative to protect and operate evolving 4G and new 5G mobile networks. These new service use cases need capabilities beyond a stateful firewall, with capacity and reliability to meet service level agreement (SLA) goals for uptime and quality of experience.

The Fortinet security platform offers 5G service providers:

• Advanced protection for mobile core network and telco cloud: Powered by Fortinet’s Virtual SPU Technology, FortiGate Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) deliver significant increases in application security performance through innovative security processing optimisations and the latest packet processing acceleration technologies. The VNFs also have a small footprint, boot within seconds, and require less storage, enabling service providers to protect their virtual networks and cloud platform cost effectively. Further, the 5G-ready FortiGate 7000 Next-Generation Firewall Series with SPU acceleration provides carrier security features and functions with industry-leading SSL inspection and application security performance for total inline protection.

• Agility with security: Fortinet offers broad ecosystem integrations with leading NFV and SDN vendors for virtual infrastructure. To ensure end-to-end security with innovative 5G services such as network slicing and multi-access edge computing (MEC), VNFs must be delivered dynamically, instantiated quickly and available wherever needed on the network. For efficient and agile deployment and utilization of these security resources, Fortinet delivers integrations with NFV platform providers like Lenovo, NFV orchestration (MANO) systems from Amdocs, Ericsson, Ciena, UBiqube, NoviFlow and SDN controllers like VMware NSX, Nokia Nuage, and Cisco ACI, and NoviFlow.

• Deep visibility and control for IoT services on edge clouds: Massive scale IoT devices are generally based on lightweight operating systems, which offer minimal security features, therefore they are vulnerable to hijacking and botnet attacks. To remove business risks, the data from these endpoints and the devices themselves require complete protection. Further, service providers offering IoT services via a cloud platform need to ensure multi-tenant isolation, VM and/or container security, and web application protection. Fortinet FortiGate NGFW VNF and FortiWeb WAF VNF protect the edge cloud platform. FortiSIEM provides complete visibility through correlated security analytics and complete visibility to track IoT devices while FortiGate has the ability to learn and profile all connected devices, and apply granular control on different classes of IoT.