Nokia launched Thursday its NetGuard Adaptive Security Operations to give communication service providers (CSPs) an automated end-to-end system to meet the demands of 5G network connectivity and to address the rising cybersecurity threat posed by internet-connected devices.
NetGuard Adaptive Security Operations replaces more manually-intensive and siloed approaches to cybersecurity risks with automation, machine learning, analytics and threat intelligence. By harnessing such capabilities, NetGuard Adaptive Security Operations expands security teams’ real-time visibility into the network, as well internet-connected devices and the telco cloud, and arms them with the ability to identify and troubleshoot suspicious anomalies at scale with rapid, automated and predictive responses.
5G’s high bandwidth and ultra-low latency capabilities greatly facilitate connecting billions of things to the internet (IoT), including smart home security monitoring systems, vehicles, drones and medical devices.
But lagging security protection of many IoT devices and increasing technical sophistication are giving cyber criminals scope for launching attacks through a much greater number of access points. This can leave unprotected devices on a network at risk of being infected by IoT malware, designed for nefarious purposes like data theft, within a matter minutes.
NetGuard Adaptive Security Operations is an enriched Security Orchestration, Analytics and Response (SOAR) suite, designed to help security operations teams to fully understand the business risks they face, improve their decision making and better control costs. It provides end-to-end security, the suite integrates audit compliance, privileged access, threat intelligence, network-based malware detection and certificate management.
Tasked with helping CSPs collect data from multiple sources and respond to security operations quickly, a SOAR platform integrates security solutions and automates many tasks, while allowing human intervention.
The NetGuard Adaptive Security Operations product suite includes the NetGuard Security Management Center, which provides an expansive, real-time view across a network; NetGuard Certificate Lifecycle Manager, which centrally controls the process of verifying, for example, that a person at one end of a connection is really who they say they are; and NetGuard Endpoint Security, which stop threats before they become costly data breaches.
Security teams today can receive more than 10,000 cyber security alerts each day. Not all these are security breaches; some are false alerts and others duplicate information. Yet, the sheer number of alerts can overwhelm security teams, which require a better way to automatically prioritize alerts in order to focus on the most threatening cases.
The Market Guide for Security Orchestration, Automation and Response Solutions (Gartner subscription required) released by Gartner in June, estimates that “by year-end 2022, 30 perent of organizations with a security team larger than five people will leverage SOAR tools in their security operations, up from less than 5 percent today.”
“5G supports a variety of use cases that promise new revenue models. That calls for new, dynamic and flexible security architectures running on shared infrastructures,” said Curtis Price, vice president of infrastructure services, IDC. “Nokia’s Adaptive Security Operations solution meets the need to identify malicious attackers, including potential insider threats, by analyzing user or machine behavior and automatically indicating the level of the threat.”
“Because 5G is about an entirely new type of network with many more potential entry points for cyber criminals, CSPs require a new approach that uses best in class machine learning, analytics, threat intelligence and automation to constantly detect risks at scale and troubleshoot those risks rapidly,” said Mary O’Neill, Nokia vice president of security products. “NetGuard Adaptive Security Operations is designed to do those things and more.”
