Nokia, Telenor invest to address new enterprise security threats

As 5G and B2B services for vertical industries start to take deeper root, Nokia and Telenor are among the companies launching new initiatives to protect enterprise systems from emerging security threats.

Nokia’s initiative is an end-to-end 5G cybersecurity lab in the US. The lab’s work will seek to address the security threats raised by “many types of interworking endpoints, extensive use of open-source software and large-scale use of 5G in a variety of industries,” according to Nokia. In particular, Nokia will “assess the security resilience of 5G networks, as well as their associated software, hardware and applications.”

Telenor meanwhile has announced a new security software joint venture, called Omny, which is setting out to “develop software that helps secure industrial operators and critical infrastructure.”

Telenor set up Omny with Aker, an industrial investment company, and Cognite, which specializes in industrial software. The new company’s target customers will include oil and gas producers, energy suppliers, public sector actors, and hospitals. Telenor will sell Omny’s software security products, which are due to become commercially available in Norway in 2023 and internationally in 2024.

Both initiatives reflect a fast-growing enterprise security trend as companies start to deploy edge computing.

“The roll-out of edge and 5G means companies could place data and workloads outside of … highly protected environments,” according to Frank De Jong, Program Director Edge to Cloud (CTO office), Orange Business Services (OBS)

“Edge is becoming the new area for security services,” agrees Thomas Sourdon, Strategic Marketing and Innovation Director, OBS, as “applications are distributed on multiple clouds and enterprise application usage spreads to home offices as well as remote sites.”

For this reason, “modern designs are leveraging highly distributed security services, at the edge of the network, that are close to end-users’ locations and close to cloud applications,” according to OBS’ Sourdon.

Gartner lists IoT, open-source code, cloud applications and complex digital supply chains as some of the key developments that are extending enterprises’ “exposed surfaces outside of a set of controllable assets,” alongside the use of cyber-physical systems. Gartner defines cyber-physical systems, which are used in industrial and manufacturing settings, as having been “engineered to orchestrate sensing, computation, control, networking and analytics to interact with the physical world”.

Indeed, Gartner cites this extension of exposed surfaces as one of the top security and risk management trends for 2022 and advises that “organizations must look beyond traditional approaches to security monitoring, detection and response to manage a wider set of security exposures.”