Verizon Business is among the many service providers looking to take advantage of their position within the business networking ecosystem to drive new cybersecurity opportunities across the lucrative enterprise market.
Wael Faheem, SVP and CIO of Verizon Business Group’s Global Technology Solutions operations, told SDxCentral in an interview that the carrier’s customer-facing cybersecurity moves are backed by what the carrier does for its internal systems.
“Security by design has been essential for everything that we do,” Faheem said. “We’re selling security, and we have to apply the same thing — drink our own champagne and prove that we’re also having the best security posture internally. And that’s something that we do year after year, raising the bar, following NIST CSF [National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework] to ensure that all of our systems that service our customers, especially those customer-facing systems, have the best-in-class security posture.”
Faheem’s comments echoed those of colleague Debika Bhattacharya who had previously explained Verizon Business’ network visibility advantage versus other vendors in the ecosystem.
“Where we extend, which our competitors do not, is we extend into the networking areas of the cloud itself,” Bhattacharya said. “The load balancers, the firewalls, all of that inside the cloud infrastructure, we’re now going to allow our customers to have visibility and manage that part of the network as well. There’s the actual physical infrastructure that is Verizon assets, but we’re extending our management into the networking elements within the cloud providers as well.”
Operators are increasingly tapping that network expertise to power differentiated cybersecurity efforts.
Vodafone, for instance, recently announced work with the European-based technology research center i2CAT Foundation to tap open radio access network (RAN) automation principles to help power multi-vendor cybersecurity systems, with an initial focus on a security information and event management (SIEM) system.
The work is looking to use open RAN principles of open interfaces that can support plug-and-play interoperability between hardware and software from multiple vendors. This would allow for greater use of automated and virtualized architectures that can replace manual tasks associated with traditional networks.
Verizon Business angles for cybersecurity differentiation
Faheem touted Verizon’s annual efforts in putting together its Data Breach Investigation Report (DBIR), which for the most recent report analyzed more than 30,000 real-world security incidents, including a record 10,626 confirmed data breaches across 94 countries.
“Everybody looks at it as a reference document for what’s happening in the industry in general, and that’s one of our value adds and differentiators in the industry,” Faheem said of that report.
The most recent DBIR report found a “substantial growth” of attacks involving vulnerability exploitation as the critical path to initiate a breach, compared to previous years. “It almost tripled (180% increase) from last year, which will come as no surprise to anyone who has been following the effect of MOVEit and similar zero-day vulnerabilities,” researchers wrote.
The report also found it takes organizations an average of 55 days to remediate vulnerabilities after patches are made available. This highlights the benefit of managed cybersecurity offerings that are often more quickly updated.
Analysys Mason recently reported that operators will see connectivity-based revenues from small- and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) over the next several years remain relatively flat at around $170 billion per year, with 20% of any growth coming from cybersecurity services. The research firm based this opportunity on operator positioning in the ecosystem.
“Areas such as network security and mobile security are much closer to operators’ core connectivity competencies than cloud services are, which gives operators a strong foothold in the security market,” Matt Small, an analyst at Analysys Mason, wrote. “Many IT services are easily bundled with fixed and mobile connectivity packages, but security services and mobile security/device management are the services that SMEs would most commonly consider taking from their telecoms provider.”
Faheem had previously noted Verizon Business’ increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) to help with network management, which are becoming harder to manage due to new network technologies like mobile edge compute (MEC) and private 5G networks. However, the use of AI is overseen by “ensuring everything we do is with privacy and security in mind.”
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