Private 5G Security Solutions with Palo Alto Networks’ Anand Oswal

This is Techstrong tv. Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong tv.

You know, this gentleman, he, we don't get him on here often enough, but we were talking off camera. Look for him. Live at RSA from our, uh, broadcast alley location, week of RSA, which is May 6th, week of May 6th, but for now, you're gonna have to see him here just on text.

Drunk TV recorded. He's Anand Oswald, he's the senior VP and general manager for network security, which in my world was all of security up until a couple years ago. Network security of Palo Alto Networks.

Anad, welcome back to Tech Drug tv. It's a pleasure to have you here, Alan. Good to see you again.

Thank you. Um, so Anad, look, your title kind of says it all, but for anyone who may be interested or curious, you want to give him a quick, quick, a non-story? Sure.

Look, you know, I've been at Palo Alto now for four plus years. Alan, I, I lead the network security business. Uh, it is just been an amazing, amazing ride.

Uh, very mission driven, uh, job that I have, and it's been, uh, it's been fun. Good to talk to you again. Absolutely.

And of course, Palo Alto Networks needs no, uh, introduction to our audience, one of the giants in the cyber world. Now, what started out as a firewall has grown into network security, cloud security endpoint, security thread intel, research teams and everything else out there. So Palo Alto now Anan.

Today's topic of discussion though is that Palo Alto has just launched an end-to-end private 5G security solutions wrapped around with services wrapped in colla in collaboration with some of the leading private 5G partners. Does this mean five G's real? Tell me finally and, and tell me what this is about.

Alright, Alan. So, and I was at Mobile World Congress and it was just, uh, it was amazing. It was amazing.

Yeah, I heard it was great. Again, The buzz and excitement around private 5G, everyone sees that as a transformative force. What I will say that it can only be transformative if it is delivered securely.

Like absolutely organizations to private 5G is the found is as the foundation of their digital transformation is reliability. The performance of technologies, the 5G standards adds some key security capabilities and key improvements over LT built-in capabilities that get you only so far, right, uh, over their encryption, et cetera. At the same time, and you know, this sophisticated and evasive cyber attacks are on the rise with nation states and cyber criminals intensifying their efforts against organizations and especially on critical infrastructure.

I tell my customers that every organization must now assume that at some point of time they'll be the target of attack that has the same sophistication and scale of a nation state attack. So 5G amazing transf force, especially, I'm seeing a lot of, lot of interest in private 5G deployments, critical infrastructure, manufacturing, utilities, oil and gas. But security must not be an afterthought.

It's very important. Anand, I want to stop right here for a second. You know what I realize, uh, there are people out here who may not understand what we mean when we say private 5G, if you wouldn't mind it, define that for them.

Yeah, look, I think, uh, if, if, if you think about the, the, the whole, the whole journey of cellular industry two G was all about voice with 3G you had, you know, some amount of data. 4G had a lot of data. 5G is all about data.

Uh, high speed, low latency connections. Now, if you think about private 5G, think about people having private deployments for their own spectrum for things like, uh, critical infrastructure for manufacturing, for factories, et cetera. These were not connected in the past and now they're getting securely connected with private 5G because private 5G gives them that, um, low level latency that gives them the high performance that you cannot get with something like wifi, right?

Right. So those deployments about connecting these factory floors, connecting utilities and gas connecting critical infrastructure are on the rise with private 5G deployments. So again, for our audience here, what we're talking about is slicing off a section of the spectrum in a given geographic area for a particular customer.

And with the, with the power of 5G, that spectrum space will actually be more secure, faster and more stable than what you're getting from your typical wifi out there. Right? So this is a, a 5G replacing wifi play.

Anand, I first heard about this couple of years ago. I said hotdog, I can't wait, but I'm still waiting. Why ha is it been security that's held it up a lack of security, or why haven't we seen it come on faster?

I think if you think about the deployments of private 5G, right, or, or the, or the industries that are going are looking at private 5G. They also been some of the industries that generally speaking have been, uh, the most slow moving industries, like if I were to say it right, or the most conservative in terms of how change happens. Uh, but they're also, uh, driving some of the most important aspects is critical infrastructure is utility, it's oil and gas, it's mining, it's your manufacturing factory flow.

So the, the constraints are high. These have not been corrected in the past. Many of these have been completely disconnected or built on legacy architectures, flat layer two networks, right?

So it's been a, it's been a slower journey to get the proof of concepts going. The, the, the architecture going, et cetera. I don't think it's because they're not aware of security.

Most of these, uh, manufacturing utility or oil and gas, uh, or even public sector customers use enterprise grade security on the IT side. And as they get onto the operational technology side, they want to ensure that they have the same level of controls, the same sophistication, the same best in class security to protect that factory floor. Because now if, just imagine if your factory floor is having a, uh, an attack like that be, that will have a lot of, uh, business impact if your utility, if your oil and gas is having that can have even more impact.

So these are very, very important. Um, I would say infrastructures that they're just being thoughtful about it. It takes time.

That's all. And, and that's why the partnership that we announced is gonna help our customers accelerate the journey because there are many components to deploying a private 5G network. Yes, there is and security, but security, as you say, has to be, I don't wanna say first and foremost, but it has to be at the front of the list, right?

It has to be at the front of the class. Absolutely, Alan. So let me ask you the hard question.

I gotta get the truth from you on there high in the sky, or can someone order this right now? And if so, how? Yes, we have, we have many customers trialing and using, uh, the solutions today.

So what we announced in February was an end-to-end private 5G security solution and services in collaboration with an ecosystem of private 5G partners bringing together the Palo Alto enterprise grade security and, and the private 5G partner integrations and services, allowing our customers, allowing organizations to easily deploy, to manage and secure their networks throughout the entire Fiji journey from day minus one, day zero, and then day end on an ongoing basis. The launch addresses the need and desire for validated integrations and it furthers our vision as a company of an integrated ecosystem to safeguard and secure these deployments. Like we are all seeing, uh, the, the convergence of ai, we are seeing zero trust, we are seeing regulatory and compliance mandates, and Palo Alto Networks 5G Security will help the organizations protect themselves against those latest threats, ensuring comprehensive security across all evolving landscape.

We've seen, we've seen the, the, um, the threat landscape have tremendous scale, tremendous sophistication. The attackers get more and more sophisticated every single day. So what we've done is that we've done via our lab testing via proven architectures and with customers, and what we've done is that three or four types of partners.

The first is organizations building new private 5G networks with partners like cel dwe Attire can easily secure the radio networks to integrations with Palo Alto Networks 5G Security. Then you have companies like NetScout that provide the network visibility. That helps me very easily map, um, MZ or SIM cards and set policies based on endpoints to point security because not always can we get it because some systems are still closed.

Then we partner with Nvidia, right, to scale these AI part applications because in some cases you want to intelligently offload traffic off the network because if I'm, if I'm streaming for example, um, a a, a robotic machine sending a video stream, I may not want to process that, that stream once I decide that that is not something I wanna do security processing on. So with the power of what we do with intelligent traffic offload with, with what we are doing with work with Nvidia, we are able to do that. And last but not the least with NTD data, trusted consulting services and solutions help customers facilitate that deployment, their management to secure the private 5G networks for a complete and full managed solution.

Love it. Let me ask you kind of a business question on this, Anand, as part of this new offering and this partnership. So if I'm, if I'm a private 5G customer and I I contract with one of these private 5G partners that you're working with, do I get my Palo Alto bundled in so it's all on one bill?

Or do I got to, I have, you know, I want one throat to choke, right? Or do I gotta pay five different bills here? So I think how, how's that Work?

I think it, I think that flexibility depends on what customers want. A lot of customers will go through a managed partner that can provide them the single, uh, uh, you know, uh, be the single solution provider for it. Some like to do it themselves.

So it it, we have flexibility. I, I don't think that is being, um, an issue for the customers. It's more on making sure that all of these pieces work together seamlessly have validated integrations and they can get the best security outcome.

Because you think about the threat landscape today, it's evolving, right? Every day, uh, we are seeing more and more sophisticated threats. Let me give you some data points.

1 billion with a b attacks every single day. Right? Now my, that may sound like a big number, but I tell my customers that 20 million of those a very small number, un net new attacks that nobody has ever seen before.

The reason, but 20 million is not such a small number. It's 20 million. 2 bill, right Now, the days of using a signature or a database to stop attacks that I have seen before in one environment and not have it happen again, are gone.

We need to be able to stop all net new day zero attacks for that. We, we have an amazing network security platform. It has 4,400 custom machine learning models that are looking for all the anomalies and, and data and processing with our, with our 400 researchers that are looking at threats and malware constantly globally to protect that customers from attacks that they have never seen before.

Command control attacks, software exploits, DNS vulnerabilities, both on request and response, um, malware, right? Uh, command and control connections, uh, data security, iot security, all of these things are there. And when we enable, these are the platform, each of them get better because we have the network effect of data which threat threat intelligence, and we have no performance impact because we are built a single pass through architecture.

So that's really thinking about what the outcome should be. What customers really want is real time security outcomes, right? It's not about, um, preventing me from threats that somebody else saw, and then I'm not gonna be infected by it.

I wanna be able to stop net new attacks. But at the end of the day, when I talk to most business owners in a customer, they have three, three objectives. They wanna make more money for their business.

Nothing wrong. They wanna save money, operational costs reduce complexity, and they wanna be out of trouble. They want a secure outcome.

And that's what we provide for our private 5G deployments and for any deployment in network security. I love it, Anand. Unfortunately, we're outta time for people who want to get more information on, on this great new offering where, where can they go within Palo Alto?

com. We have a lot of information on how we can use a network city platform and how you can secure your private 5G deployments. Love it.

All right, my friend, I'm holding you to this promise. I'm gonna see you at RSAA the week of May 6th. Thank You for your time.

All right. Have a wonderful day. Thank you.

Anand Oswald, senior vp, a GM network security Palo Al Palo Alo, Palo Alto Networks here on text Drug tv. We're gonna take a break. We'll be back in a moment.