Why now is time to invest in your 5G capabilities and secure it

We’ve reached the point now where businesses need to look at their approach to 5G, and ask “do I want to be status quo, or do I want to be revolutionary?” With roughly a decade to go until we start to see 6G drive real tangible benefits for industry connectivity, now is the time to invest in your 5G capabilities and start the foundational work. Not only will your organisation be able to better prepare for 6G, but you will also be able to tap into the benefits of distributed infrastructure.

Has 5G failed?

It’s no secret that 5G hasn’t lived up to its promise and set the world alight. However, we must be careful not to slip into the habit of viewing 5G’s successes through an entirely western lens. While it’s true that we haven’t seen the uptake and proliferation of use cases that was promised in the west, the same can’t be said for other countries. If you look at places such as China, Japan and Singapore, they’ve had the benefit of essentially building net new. They ripped out existing technologies and replaced them with 5G, and to great effect. Whereas in the west, the focus has been on updating existing infrastructure, and quite some progress has been made.

However, despite the investment made into infrastructure, telcos have been unable to benefit from the success of 5G, largely because the right people aren’t taking advantage of the right digital infrastructure. So, while there’s faster radios and YouTube videos load a bit quicker on your phone, true 5G delivered through the backend hasn’t brought about the diversity in distribution and localisation that was promised. This is then compounded when you consider that, at an enterprise level, organisations tend to be more interested in Wi-Fi. The issue here is that not only is the infrastructure not fully developed, but the devices that employees and organisations are using are not geared towards 5G activity. This means that organisations are faced with the dual issue of having to modernise a workforce as well as their broader ecosystems. So, the question now is: does your organisation chase the 5G wave?

Getting ahead of the game

If you look at the perfunctory Gs – 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G – without a doubt, the biggest leap and the hardest to perfect is the one from 4G to 5G. My advice would be to start investing in your 5G capabilities now and get ahead of any potential roadblocks. It’s important that organisations unlock the benefits from 5G now. The distributed infrastructure that it brings allows you to not be completely and utterly reliant on a telco to run everything. The distributed ecosystem is critical, so ultimately, if 5G wasn’t performing, you can have the workload moved right down to the radio where the user is.

In the 6G world that we’re heading towards, that will all be automated by AI. If you look at the big shift from 5G to 6G, besides the frequency of the radio, it’sgoing to be the automation of the decisions that really drives tangible business. These include benefits such as optimal path mapping and application relocation. All these things are reliant on getting away from the core world and to the distributed world.

Integrating 5G securely

I always start by asking every enterprise what applications they currently have connected by cellular. Whether it’s a billboard, vending machine, or transportation devices, the sheer magnitude of what we discover is always enlightening. So, the first step is always, look at your scope and understand what has a sim in it.

The next stage is all about understanding which technology they are already using that supports 5G. For many organisations, existing infrastructure won’t be 5G compatible and investment will be needed to bring technology stacks up to par. But even if investment is approved, are their staff knowledgeable enough on the technology to actually reap the benefits of a 5G network? This is why I would recommend any organisation making their first foray into 5G technology to launch a small, isolated project internally that can take advantage of 5G and help to uplevel staff. By building this project out and troubleshooting the issues as they appear, IT teams can understand their current tech and knowledge gaps and be able to build that expertise before sharing learnings with the wider organisation.

A potential use case for organisation would be  to trial a transition to a private 5G network in a factory environment where traditional Wi-Fi is ‘eaten’ by specific stocked up products. Traditionally organisations would have been forced to expand their Wi-Fi with access points every three meters, which could become a costly undertaking. In order to prove the reduced cost and complexity of a private 5G solution, IT teams should isolate the use case to one factory and suggest a solution that could be scaled across the wider business so that the IT team can share initial results with the C-suite to secure further investment.

The final element that teams need to be thinking about is how to enjoy the advantages 5G brings without opening their attack surface to intruders. This is where isolation and segmentation will be key. The big issue most companies face when applying new technology is how to do so when you are relying on your legacy infrastructure to maintain everyday operations. To do this you need to isolate the new 5G network from the legacy infrastructure at the beginning. It allows teams to tinker and play around with the new technology without fear that it might impact the current systems or give bad actors the gap they need to take control of operations. Once the teams are happy with the implementation and are looking to migrate it into the wider system, they should be looking to leverage a singular zero trust service to manage, secure and have total visibility of all the technology to prevent routable access between the legacy infrastructure and the newly implemented ones.

Innovation vs stagnation

If organisations were to ignore 5G completely and wait for 6G to show its benefits then they may face a huge uphill, costly climb to keep themselves competitive with early adopters. The short-term monetary gains from avoiding investment into this technology may be short-lived and could end up costing much more in the future as IT teams will not only need to rip out their entire infrastructure to make way for 6G, but also will have accumulated multiple legacy technology stacks that will require multiple admin and security solutions to manage.

By building the foundational technology now, businesses can create an infrastructure that is scalable and is underpinned by one security overseer that is able to grow as the solutions evolve.

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Tags: 5G, cybbersecurity