Open RAN best practice security tests now available

Anthony Laing, GM of networking at NEC XON.

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NEC XON and Fortinet have collaborated to create a demonstration and test facility of best practice Open RAN security in the NEC XON Experience Centre in South Africa.

The Experience Centre now includes FortiGate from Fortinet, the world’s most deployed next-generation firewall and highest performing hyper-scale firewall, as well as NEC XON’s carrier-grade integration expertise and resources.

“We can cost-effectively secure your Open RAN environment using Fortinet’s FortiGate and you can now test it in our Experience Centre before bringing it to your live environment,” says Anthony Laing, GM of Networking at NEC XON.

5G massively increases data traffic and introduces architectural shifts to mobile network operator (MNO) and communication service provider (CSP) networks. Multi-access edge computing (MEC), for example, requires them to protect against emerging threats but not sacrifice the customer experience.

Working with FortiGate, NEC XON can show customers how to get deep visibility into their user, application and threat environments via a single pane of glass, and how to protect themselves from unknown threats in the emerging 5G era.

“There are new security concerns for the MNOs and CSPs in the 5G world, particularly where Open RAN enables integrated equipment from a multitude of vendors,” says Paul Willemse, technical sales consultant at NEC XON. “Key use cases to secure are the radio access network (RAN), mobile roaming, 5G edge deployments and the telco edge cloud (TEC).”

These types of security concerns have not traditionally been as advanced as they are now in the Open RAN world, therefore traditionally relegating them to lower importance. However, it is essential to prioritise security in 5G and Open RAN environments, since it bakes security into the infrastructure and secures these emerging threat vectors.

Fortinet’s high-performance security solutions include automation capabilities and AI-driven threat intelligence that customers can test in the Experience Centre. Fortinet’s solutions will protect all domains and layers of MNO and CSP 5G networks. NEC XON will leverage Fortinet solutions and the Japanese multinational ICT giant NEC’s network expertise accumulated at its NEC Centers of Excellence (COE) and NEC Open Networks. NEC Open Networks is an industry-leading ecosystem consisting of an end-to-end suite of open products and solutions, enable the company to support CSPs with future-proofed solutions in a safe and secure way.