Microsoft finds that mobile threat defense and intelligence are now critical part of cyber defense

When handled and analyzed properly, actionable data holds the key to enabling solid, 360-degree cybersecurity strategies and responses. However, many corporations lack effective tools to collect, analyze, and act on the massive volume of security events that arise daily across their mobile fleet. An international bank recently faced this challenge. 

By deploying Pradeo Security alongside Microsoft Endpoint Manager and Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), the bank was able to harness its mobile data and better protect the company.

Organizations rely on mobility to increase productivity and improve the customer experience. But the proliferation of smartphones and other mobile devices has also expanded the attack surface of roughly 5 billion mobile devices in the world, many used to handle sensitive corporate data. To safeguard company assets, organizations need to augment their global cyber defense strategy with mobile threat intelligence.

In 2017, the Chief Information Security Office (CISO) of an international bank recognized that the company needed to address the risk of data exposure on mobile. Cybercriminals exploit smart phones at the application, network, and OS levels, and infiltrate them through mobile applications 78 percent of the time. 

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was also scheduled to go into effect the following year. The company needed to better secure its mobile data to safeguard the company and comply with the new privacy regulations.

The company deployed Microsoft Endpoint Manager to gain visibility into the mobile devices accessing corporate resources. Microsoft Endpoint Manager is the recently announced convergence of Microsoft Intune and Configuration Manager functionality and data, plus new intelligent actions, offering seamless, unified endpoint management. Then, to ensure the protection of these corporate resources, the company deployed Pradeo Security Mobile Threat Defense, which is integrated with Microsoft.

Pradeo Security and Microsoft Endpoint Manager work together to apply conditional access policies to each mobile session. Conditional access policies allow the security team to automate access based on the circumstances. For example, if a user tries to gain access using a device that is not managed by Microsoft Endpoint Manager, the user may be forced to enroll the device. 

Pradeo Security enhances Microsoft Endpoint Manager’s capabilities by providing a clear security status of any mobile devices accessing corporate data, which Microsoft can evaluate for risk. If a smartphone is identified as non-compliant based on the data that Pradeo provides, conditional access policies can be applied.

For example, if the risk is high, the bank could set policies that block access. The highly granular and customizable security policies offered by Pradeo Security gave the CISO more confidence that the mobile fleet was better protected against threats specifically targeting his industry.

The bank also connected Pradeo Security to Microsoft Defender ATP in order to automatically feed it with always current mobile security inputs. Microsoft Defender ATP helps enterprises prevent, detect, investigate, and respond to advanced cyberthreats. Pradeo Security enriches Microsoft Defender ATP with mobile security intelligence. 

Immediately, the bank was able to see information on the latest threats targeting their mobile fleet. Only a few weeks later, there was enough data in the Microsoft platform to draw trends and get a clear understanding of the company’s mobile threat environment.

Pradeo relies on a network of millions of devices (iOS and Android) across the globe to collect security events related to the most current mobile threats. Pradeo leverages machine learning mechanisms to distill and classify billions of raw and anonymous security facts into actionable mobile threat intelligence.

The bank’s mobile ecosystem entirely relies on Pradeo and Microsoft, as its security team finds it to be the most cost-effective combination when it comes to mobile device management, protection and intelligence.

A10 Networks Orion 5G security lineup delivers business transformation for service providers

A10 Networks announced its Orion 5G Security Suite that enables mobile carriers and service providers to be ready for the business transformation 5G and NFV brings. The suite allows customers to meet the requirements needed today and helps them future proof their networks for tomorrow by delivering security, scalability, agility and analytics, while integrating with a partner ecosystem. A10 brings unique expertise from working with many of the production 5G networks that are now operational around the world.

A10 Networks has been at the forefront of initial 5G rollouts with tier-one carriers worldwide and is working with many others to plan for their future 5G initiatives. 

With the announcement of the 5G Orion Security Suite, service providers have a proven comprehensive suite of secure applications services that have been engineered for cloud-native architecture to aid in making their 5G and NFV strategies successful. 

The Orion 5G Security Suite enables advanced security and reliability functions as individual services by modularizing and offering them as a service layer with a set of connected technologies that employ automated intelligence, machine learning and centralized visibility and control.

Partnering with tier-one operators, A10 has honed its solutions to meet the critical 5G requirements for improved security, reliability and performance learned from 5G network rollouts over the last year. A10 provides an interconnected suite – virtual or physical – resulting in lower latency, larger scale, higher reliability and lower TCO—all of which have been required for the emerging 5G use cases customers are enabling.

In the last year to 18 months, first movers have deployed the first wave of 5G networks and demonstrated improved customer satisfaction and increased average revenue per user (ARPU), despite an increase in network demands, including higher data usage and download rates.

The Orion 5G Security Suite addresses existing and emerging mobile network architecture requirements for agility, consolidated services, greater scale, and lower latency communications across the Gi-LAN, virtualized evolved packet core (vEPC), and multi-access edge computing (MEC) environments. 

The Orion 5G Security Suite’s disaggregated, cloud-native security services provide agility while maintaining scale and performance by leveraging cutting-edge technologies. It also goes beyond just protecting the data plane through a GiFW by adding protection for the control plane and signaling plane with full visibility.

The Orion 5G Security Suite represents a major evolution of the company’s 5G strategy outlined in late 2018 by providing a comprehensive solution for mobile operators and other service providers to successfully deploy 5G non-standalone (NSA) and standalone (SA) solutions at hyperscale for 5G devices and new NFVi requirements.

A10 supports existing 4G and 3G network architectures and use cases for the Gi-LAN and EPC, while catering to demanding requirements for 5G architectures, including the cloud-native agility needed for MEC. These solutions can be deployed in infrastructure but are future proofed for 5G deployments. This includes functional consolidation for application visibility and control, subscriber-aware intelligent traffic steering, Gi/SGi firewall with carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT), GTP/SCTP firewall, integrated DDoS for frequently attacked services, intelligent traffic steering and more.

5G demands are inherently different than 4G, with smaller packet sizes, more throughput, and higher concurrent session counts. A10 solutions can scale concurrent sessions to multi-billion levels and throughput to multi-terabit levels in a scale-out cluster. 5G deployments can benefit from compact and efficient options, for example, 385 Gbps in compact physical network functions (PNFs), or high-performance 180 Gbps virtual network functions (VNFs) and cloud-native network functions (CNFs). 

Support for Kubernetes and Docker containers are available now. The compact PNF form factors and very high-performance software offerings (including containerized) are especially beneficial in emerging MEC use cases where space and power are at a premium.

With new user-plane and control-plane security requirements coupled with the increased attack surface and scale brought by 5G and IoT device proliferation, more advanced, scalable and automated approaches are needed. To guarantee uptime and ensure control- and user-plane security, components include edge firewall, GTP firewall, Gi/SGi firewall, control- and user-plane policy enforcement, DNS protection, RAN security gateways (SeGW), and more. 

Additionally, A10’s advanced DDoS protection solution includes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities with its Zero-day Attack Protection (ZAP), continuous base lining, and One-DDoS for distributed intelligence. This provides full visibility into all packets versus traditional sample-based-only solutions. Network-wide ML-powered DDoS detection and mitigation for in-house protection can also be offered as a customer scrubbing service.

A10’s solutions can be delivered in a variety of form factors to meet the demands of the emerging NFVi architecture including, VNFs, CNFs, bare metal and PNFs. These solutions are integrated with leading NFVi architectures and interoperate with multiple MANO environments for faster network roll-out and optimized performance and agility. A10 also provides flexible software licensing and consumption with FlexPool subscription-based capacity pooling licensing.

A10 Harmony Controller provides actionable intelligence to manage subscriber services, meet law enforcement agency mandates and compliance, and deliver per-subscriber analytics. Harmony Controller provides visibility, management, orchestration and automation. Coordination of distributed One-DDoS data from all the Orion 5G Security Suite solutions is seamlessly orchestrated from the integrated aGalaxy TPS system.

A10’s products integrate with multiple third-party solutions and vendors, ranging from DevOps tools, such as Ansible, to providers of 5G solutions such as Ericsson, Red Hat, NEC, Tech Mahindra and Lenovo.

IDC finds that the refresh cycle of Surface and iPad will keep tablets market alive in the EMEA region

The EMEA tablet market reached 10.9 million units in the third quarter of the year, a drop of 8.2 percent on the same quarter last year, according to data from IDC. The contraction in consumer demand continues to be the main inhibitor of tablet adoption. 

As consumers lack compelling reasons to refresh their devices, life cycles continuously increase, leading to a market slowdown. However, the deployment of tablets in the commercial segments remains healthy, with a 4.2 percent year-on-year increase, due to the larger number of usage scenarios generated by digital transformation.

"In a quarter usually marked by seasonality, where there is a balance between the top two companies, Apple maintained and consolidated its market leadership," said Helena Ferreira, research analyst, IDC Western Europe Personal Computing Devices. "The growing market saturation is driving consolidation, as the top five companies become increasingly dominant, and in developed economies, like in Western Europe, the top five represented more than three-quarters of the market."   

The overall tablet market in Western Europe declined 6.0 percent year-on-year in the third quarter of this year, while and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) declined 12.0 percent year-on-year.

"Slate tablet shipments are continuing to drag down overall tablet results in both CEE and MEA, mostly due to the consumer consumption slowdown and significant drops in below-10in. tablets, due to stiff competition from large-screen smartphones," said Nikolina Jurisic, program manager, IDC CEMA.

Apple retained the market leadership in EMEA, ahead of its product refresh cycle. Samsung posted a double-digit decline, as the main focus is on pushing its prosumer S series and driving more profitability. Lenovo regained third position, filling the gap left by Huawei's decline. 

Huawei dropped to fourth and continues to suffer from the impact of the ban on consumer confidence. Amazon remained in the top 5 and continues to dominate the ultra-low-end price ranges, particularly during promotional periods such as Prime Day in the third quarter.

The EMEA tablet market is forecast to decline by 10.2 percent year-on-year in both the fourth quarter and for the whole year 2019. The dynamics affecting the market, particularly in the consumer segment, are expected to persist both in the consumer and in the commercial segments in the coming quarters.

"Despite the decline in total units shipped, the tier A vendors will sustain market value, particularly through the most recent iterations of iPad and Surface," said Daniel Goncalves, senior research analyst, IDC Western Europe Personal Computing Devices. "The new iPad with a first party keyboard and a new operating system designed to enhance productivity features in a tablet environment is expected to generate interest among prosumers and to continue boosting renewals of old tablets. On the other hand, the adoption of Surface Pro as a notebook replacement is expected to continue to thrive and to increasingly drive horizontal deployments in enterprise." 

The commercial market in EMEA is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 4.6 percent between 2019 and 2023.

"In the long run, the commercial segment is expected to grow due to the transition to mobility and growing user case scenarios for deploying tablets into businesses," said Jurisic.

Keysight, Marvin Test Solutions come together to speed manufacturing of mmWave semiconductors

Keysight Technologies announced this week that its collaboration with Marvin Test Solutions Inc. (MTS) – a supplier of functional test solutions – has resulted in the development of a fast and accurate 5G semiconductor manufacturing test platform.

The two parties focused on advancing beamformer integrated circuit (IC) test technology to help manufacturers of semiconductors accelerate the production of high performance 5G integrated ICs. Marvin integrated Keysight’s PXIe-based Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) to achieve accurate and fast measurements in its TS-960e-5G mmWave Test System.

The Keysight M980xA PXIe Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) meets the most demanding multiport challenges with a true multiport architecture that offers exceptional performance no matter how many ports you use. Gain deeper insights into devices with the widest available line of measurement applications for PXI VNAs, including spectrum analysis and noise figure measurements.

The M980xA Series offers the performance required for testing passive components, amplifiers, mixers or frequency converters. It provides key PXI VNA specifications such as dynamic range, measurement speed, trace noise and temperature stability. 

Keysight’s recently introduced M980xA Series network analyzers offer the scalability required to test multi-port components, front end modules (FEMs) and base stations that rely on beamforming technology. Mobile operators are deploying beamforming technology to extend cellular coverage and deliver higher data rates, leading to improved mmWave 5G network reliability and efficiency. 

To ensure reliable and efficient 5G mmWave communications, the performance of critical elements that form part of the beamformer IC need to be rigorously tested under linear and nonlinear conditions across the entire workflow from design, validation to manufacturing.

“Our collaboration with Marvin Test Solutions demonstrates that scalable production testing of beamformer solutions can be achieved with Keysight’s PXI VNAs,” said Kailash Narayanan, vice president and general manager of Keysight's wireless test group. “We’re excited to help shape the future of 5G mmWave production testing with our beamformer IC test solutions using integrated component and system-level simulation tools to deliver high precision measurements at mmWave frequency bands.”

Martello completes initial phase of testing its SD-WAN offering on ENCQOR 5G

Martello Technologies announced this week that it has completed the initial phase of testing for its SD-WAN solution as part of a project with ENCQOR 5G, Canada’s initial pre-commercial fifth-generation (5G) wireless network for open innovation. 

Among the first SD-WAN vendors in Canada to initiate a project on the ENCQOR 5G testbed, Martello aims to demonstrate that its SD-WAN solution can deliver stable and predictable handling of unified communications (UC) and other real-time IoT traffic on 5G networks.

Launched in March last year, ENCQOR 5G is funded by the Government of Canada through the Strategic Innovation Fund, along with the Governments of Quebec and Ontario as well as leading industry players Ericsson, Ciena, Thales, CGI and IBM. ENCQOR 5G is coordinated by Innovation ENCQOR, and delivered in Ontario by Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) and in Quebec by Innovation ENCQOR, CEFRIO and Prompt.

ENCQOR 5G brings together SMEs, industry, government, researchers and academia in both Quebec and Ontario to collaborate on the commercialization of disruptive products, processes, and services, providing a first-to-market advantage and to improve the ability of SMEs to scale.

According to Gartner, in 2020, worldwide 5G wireless network infrastructure revenue will reach $4.2 billion, an 89% increase from 2019 revenue of $2.2 billion1. The enterprise will increasingly become the focus of 5G services, expanding into new real-time and mobile IoT applications such as autonomous vehicles, remote healthcare, the mobile office, and agriculture and retail sector applications.

The project with ENCQOR 5G underpins current Martello projects and the development of new solutions, while fostering collaboration with companies within the alliance. Following on Martello’s successful mobile SD-WAN for autonomous vehicles proof of concept with BlackBerry QNX in May 2019, the project with ENCQOR 5G leverages the Company’s leadership and unique expertise in network connectivity for real-time and mobile IoT applications.

In the initial phase of the project, Martello has demonstrated compatibility with LTE-A, a precursor to 5G; in later phases, Martello will test UC traffic specifically, over LTE-A and 5G.

Martello’s SD-WAN and link balancing technology provides network connectivity in challenging environments, including in developing regions with a limited telecom infrastructure. With 5G emerging as the next generation network, Martello is future-proofing its SD-WAN solution to ensure that challenging mobile IoT applications on 5G networks, such as autonomous vehicles and the distributed, mobile office, stay seamlessly connected to mobile networks.

“Through our work with the ENCQOR 5G testbed, we have an opportunity to engage with many of the world’s top technology players, from Ericsson to CGI, in accelerating Canadian innovation in 5G,” said John Proctor, president and CEO of Martello. “ENCQOR 5G is central to Martello’s strategy, giving us the ability to integrate solutions at the earliest points in the development cycle and demonstrate Martello’s 5G readiness.”

“Martello is leading SD-WAN innovation on 5G networks with ENCQOR 5G,” said Claudia Krywiak, president and CEO, Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE), the coordinating member of ENCQOR 5G for Ontario. “Businesses like Martello are paving the way to Canada’s 5G future, with the support of private industry, federal and provincial governments.”

Samsung delivers multi-vendor interoperability of cloud-native 5G standalone core with HPE and Openet

Samsung Electronics, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Openet announced integration of a cloud-native 5G standalone (SA) Core with multivendor interoperability. This represents an important milestone and demonstrates significant progress in the journey toward 5G SA, driven by the 5G SA Core collaboration among Samsung, HPE and Openet, announced in February 2019.

Samsung’s 5G SA Core brings together cloud-native 5G network functions from the three companies to deliver end-to-end 5G SA services. For this multi-vendor interoperability test, Samsung has integrated its control, user plane network function & orchestrator with HPE’s shared data environment and Network Functions (NF), and Openet’s policy and charging solutions. 

The 5G Core also provides multiple simultaneous network slices for a variety of services, such as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) that validate the principles of cloud-native design, virtual network scaling and edge-to-core networks.

“By offering a complete 5G Core that is designed around an open service-based architecture, operators can break out of the single vendor lock-in of previous generation networks,” said Domenico Convertino, Vice President Product Management, Communications & Media Solutions, HPE. “The open architecture also allows operators to have a smooth evolution to 5G with proven co-existence with 4G network technologies.”

“Openness and interoperability are foundations for 5G systems. This demonstration shows the power of taking a multi-vendor partnership approach to providing 5G SA Core and how it can enable network slicing with dynamic policy and charging rules,” said Joe Hogan, CTO and Founder of Openet. “Being able to manage the quality of service for 5G network slicing will allow operators to enter into many new markets with innovative offers and open up new revenue streams.”

With this multi-vendor solution, Samsung’s 5G SA Core enables operators to select innovative network functions offered by numerous IT vendors. Through this approach, combined with the ability to offer advanced telecommunication technologies such as networks slicing and URLLC, the three companies are continuing their efforts in 5G collaboration to bring new opportunities and options to mobile operators.

Earlier this year, mobile operators in Korea and the United States have helped to successfully usher in the 5G era with the launch of commercial service using Samsung Network’s end-to-end 5G solutions, accelerating 5G deployments around the world. 

The 5G SA Core will help operators offer innovative 5G SA services, such as network slicing, mobile edge computing, AI analytics and ultra-low latency (URLLC) networks. The solution will play a significant role in driving new business opportunities for mobile operators as the industry is focusing on the next generation services spanning autonomous driving, smart factory, smart farm, and AR/VR.

“5G SA Core built on open architecture is a key driver of the innovative services that 5G promises, and it will help mobile operators create new revenue streams and business opportunities,” said Wonil Roh, vice president and head of product strategy, Networks Business at Samsung Electronics. “Samsung is excited to continue building out a robust and open 5G ecosystem with global partners like HPE and Openet.  We look forward to extending our 5G technical leadership around the globe by widening our end-to-end 5G solution portfolio.”

The 5G SA Core solution from Samsung can be demonstrated either remotely, or on-site at Samsung’s 5G Core Open Lab located in Korea. The lab offers interoperability tests among multiple vendors and shows the robust features of 5G core solutions, while integrating cloud platforms from partners into Samsung’s functions.