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5G promises transformative mobility through enhanced mobile broadband experiences and industrial digitization. To safeguard these advances, we are announcing the industry’s first 5G-native security. We’re bringing our expertise in securing networks, clouds and devices to the 5G world, enabling service providers and enterprises to turn 5G networks into highly secure networks. In the process, we’re offering multiple industry firsts:
With this release, we are helping service providers and enterprises protect their end-to-end 5G infrastructure across all layers and all key locations of the distributed, cloud native, multi-cloud 5G architectures.
This single platform for 5G security will help our customers:
5G networks enable new enterprise use cases, such as smart manufacturing, smart cities, remote medical access, self-driving cars and industrial-scale IoT networks with ultra-low latency, mission-critical reliability, and a higher degree of mobility. Service providers and enterprises need new solutions to protect their investments in this groundbreaking technology.
The traditional approach to security in 4G networks focused on securing perimeters. 5G networks will be built upon distributed clouds, and they will come with software-defined perimeters with multiple exposed interfaces. 5G network functions are containerized and will run on multiple cloud stacks. This makes the old perimeter protection model insufficient in light of massive growth in industry and internet of things (IoT) connectivity, as well as cloud services and edge computing. ML-powered NGFWs for 5G address these new 5G networking security challenges.
In 4G networks, the device-level attack surface was focused predominantly on a few device types, such as smartphones and LTE routers. With 5G, however, billions of IoT devices loom large on the threat horizon. IoT is the low-hanging fruit for attackers who are likely to leverage 5G speeds. Unit 42 – the threat research arm of Palo Alto Networks – has reported that 98% of all IoT traffic is unencrypted, exposing personal and confidential data on the network.
Network slicing in 5G paves the way for new business services that can realize the true potential of 5G capabilities. Network slicing allows dedicating a set of network resources to an enterprise. But this means 5G network slices will require custom security posture and dynamic security.
Any 5G security platform must now encompass all traffic (data, control and signaling planes), protect networks and provide a safe environment for enterprise users and service provider customers. That’s why our approach to 5G security is based on:
This approach is designed to provide enterprises and service providers with:
Service providers can gain full visibility and security control across all layers and all key locations of their 5G networks with Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls.
Enterprises can deploy Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls directly inside their mobile networks for full visibility and control on the 5G service layer and user data traffic.
5G security capabilities are available on the following Palo Alto Networks next-generation firewalls: PA-5200 Series and PA-7000 Series hardware models as well as all VM-Series software models running PAN-OS 10.0+. Security Services can be added based on use case requirements. 5G security capabilities will be available on CN-Series containerized firewalls soon. This means that if you already use our Palo Alto Networks next-generation firewalls, you can continue to use the same platform inside your public 5G or private 5G network.
Learn how to get started securing your 5G investments with the new Palo Alto Networks comprehensive 5G security solution.
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