Ericsson Technology Review Magazine 2021 – Spotlight on high-performance networks

Securing the future with high-performance networks

Already at this early phase in the era of 5G high-performance networks, advanced edge and cloud technologies are opening up massive opportunities for communication service providers (CSPs) across industry segments ranging from manufacturing to retail, banking, health care and travel. Resilient 5G systems that are always available, perform as expected and deliver uncompromised information can and will play a critical role in securing assets and enabling wider economic growth and market competitiveness in the years ahead.

As part of the wider digitalization trend, society is increasingly dependent on workloads deployed on the 5G network platform. Regardless of whether these workloads are mission critical, business critical or best effort, they are all rapidly becoming society critical. Citizen IDs, digital payments, medical applications and educational tools are real-world examples of workloads that have become essential aspects of everyday life for many people today.

A big part of our work at Ericsson right now is using 5G technologies to reinvent the building blocks of enterprise connectivity and compute – delivering the highest possible performance standards and security assurance of mission- and business-critical processes such as factory automation, remote control of assets and more. This new enterprise platform will be characterized by highly resilient and interoperable systems in terms of reliability, availability, robustness, security and privacy. 

To help our stakeholders better understand the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in this area, we decided to put together this special issue of Ericsson Technology Review. It addresses the topic of 5G high-performance networks from six different angles: zero trust architecture, robustness in critical networks, network slicing scenarios, extended reality, post-quantum security, and compliance auditing in the cloud.

Since the transition toward zero trust architecture in the latest 5G specifications represents such a major step change for the telecom industry, I think the article on page 20 is particularly worthy of your attention. By combining traditional security principles with policy-based authorization decisions in runtime, a zero trust architecture enables CSPs to both minimize the risk of security breaches and limit damage by preventing lateral movement inside the network if a security breach does occur.

The article about network robustness on page 8 addresses the question of how to cope with the widely varying requirements with regard to resilience, availability and reliability that are cropping up as a result of all the new device categories, use cases and ecosystems encompassed by the digital transformation. Mobile network operators need to have the ability to serve up the required level of network robustness on a case-by-case basis. Since 5G is designed to meet even the most challenging requirements on resilience, availability and reliability, resilient 5G systems make it easy to deliver optimal robustness for mobile networks that are increasingly critical to business and society.

The third article I would like to draw your attention to is the one about the potential threat presented by quantum computers to mobile network security. Although crypto-breaking quantum computers do not yet exist, the possibility of their future existence has prompted action on the part of standards developing organizations such as the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Internet Engineering Task Force and the 3GPP. You can find out about the new post-quantum algorithms that are currently in the final stages of standardization by checking out the article on page 30.

We hope this special issue of our magazine helps you deepen your understanding of the concept of 5G high-performance networks and their enormous potential to transform business and society in the years ahead. Please share it with your colleagues and business partners to help us spread the message as widely as possible.