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Team Nucleus
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24th September, 2020
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Today The Times newspaper has featured a 20-page report on the ‘Future of 5G’ bringing together leading experts from across industry to talk about the rollout of 5G technology. Our CTO, Martin Rudd shared his views on how prepared the cybersecurity industry is to deliver on 5G.
5G SECURITY CHALLENGES
‘The readiness and reliability of cybersecurity to deliver on 5G’s promises is being driven by the rapidly increasing billions of interconnected devices, remote workers and the growth of cloud infrastructure. Add to this the increasingly heavy compute and network infrastructure that is needed to support 5G applications, devices, data and services.
Put simply, it’s not actually about 5G itself, but the pressure which 5G is putting on the wider tech and cyber infrastructure. It is all about the scale. Likewise the network will become more complex within 5G in order to prioritise and provide demanding user experience and applications and cyber needs to adapt to encompass demands of scale, data and volume of threats.
HOME WORKFORCE SECURITY CHALLENGES
What we saw when the majority of workforces transitioned to home working was that there was an upper limit to global connectivity, compute power and cloud availability. There are lessons learned from this that we need to consider as we experience ‘blooms’ in technology over the coming years – when, for example, smart cities and Industry 4.0 start coming online apace. There will be a distinct need for the technical and security infrastructure to support these leaps in the number of devices whilst still keeping each one secure and operational.
Take, for example, edge computing (where computation and data storage is brought closer to the location it is needed) and autonomous vehicles to ensure ultra-low latency when it comes to machine decision making. Autonomous vehicles require low latency combined with compute and data hungry applications placed at the edge – a ½ a second delay here could mean an untold/unwanted incident. In order to have this working effectively you need to have intelligent networks to prioritise this network traffic and able to work around congestion whilst ensuring the integrity and security of the data.
5G AND SECURITY TOOLS
What we’re seeing is that security tools need to be central to 5G rollout due to the demands of scale, latency and compute and that legislation needs to be a vehicle for improving security and integrity of data as well as enable the innovation and economic growth that 5G will bring.’
It is clear that there is a long way to go before the UK is ready to rollout 5G technology, but with these security challenges comes a wealth of opportunity for the UK to advance technology and optimise infrastructures to cope with the demands that 5G will place on them.
You can read the full report ‘Future of 5G’ here.
To carry on the conversation or find out more about our views on 5G technology, please contact us
