How to get 5G right to deliver seamless and secure customer experiences

Since the advent of 5G, many telecommunications service providers have - or are continuing to - transform to meet the ever-changing demands of the digital economy, while simultaneously aiming to reduce costs.

As part of this evolution, many are modernising their network infrastructure to accommodate new cloud-native 5G architecture. In fact, F5’s recent State of Application Services 2020: Telecom Edition revealed that 91 percent of service providers are preparing for 5G by adopting cloud, automation and orchestration, and network function virtualisation (NFV).

And rightfully so, with Juniper Research forecasting global 5G revenues to reach $489.2 billion by 2025 - representing 44 percent of operator-billed revenue.

With this, however, comes a complex array of interoperability, security and visibility, and regulatory compliance challenges for service providers - insofar that many resort to outsourcing their core 5G infrastructure to a Network Equipment Providers (NEP).

But a common pain point service providers experience when outsourcing their 5G core infrastructure, is that they lose the ability to see what’s happening on the network. This can present significant security risks for containerised applications, impact the service provider’s governance of the network, and increase operational overhead.

Fortunately, deploying a service mesh to a network can provide container-by-container traceability. Because a service mesh allows for flexible, reliable and secure communication between containers, it’s able to provide more granular visibility - putting control back into the hands of the service provider. After all, you can’t secure what you can’t see, hence visibility is key to security in the 5G era.

Poor security impacts the customer experience

This is ever more important since insecure applications can have a direct impact on the customer experience, which has consequences for both the service provider’s brand and its competitive edge. Monetary losses aside, this is because the resulting downtime of an attack - or slow performance as a result of poor traffic management—can significantly impede the user experience.

With data security now table stakes for consumers, application convenience has quickly become the defining element for a brand’s value proposition. In fact, 60 percent of Australians say convenience is the most important aspect, according to F5’s recent 2020 Curve of Convenience report. Moreover, F5 also found that while 90 percent of service providers are operating in multi-cloud environments, security concerns are still top of mind.

So with security intrinsically linked to the customer experience, having a resilient service mesh architecture for container workloads has never been more important for service providers looking to enhance the customer experience.

Achieving modern application delivery at scale

Beyond convenience, visibility, and security, service providers also need to ensure their applications can adapt to the rapidly increasing customer and business demands of today’s digital-first world. This requires applications to scale up, scale down, defend, and heal themselves autonomously.

Through our work with service provider customers, we’ve found that application visibility, security, and scalability are key to getting 5G right. In light of this, F5 is helping customers deploy modern and adaptive applications at scale. We recently announced BIG-IP Service Proxy for Kubernetes (SPK) and Carrier-Grade Aspen Mesh, which enable service providers to enhance digital experiences for customers whilst providing full visibility of network traffic, interoperability between 4G and 5G, and compliance with 5G regulations. You can learn more about these solutions here.

As organisations move into the new generation of cellular networks, their cloud-native 5G core services will need to coexist and inter-operate with existing 3G and 4G signalling protocols, applications, billing systems, policies, and infrastructure. To realise 5G’s full potential, service providers will need to overcome the challenges associated with mastering a cloud-native, microservices-based approach to service delivery.

Getting it right will have a direct impact on service providers’ ability to provide a seamless, secure experience for customers – and therefore a sharpened competitive edge. The challenges of 5G are big, but the revenue opportunities are even greater.

If you are a service provider looking to enhance the security of your 5G network, feel free get in touch with me around how F5 can assist at [email protected]