Dish Touts Benefits of Cloud-Based Network as Others Worry About Security

Dish Network is building a 5G stand-alone network that depends on software and is rooted in the cloud, Marc Rouanne, Dish Wireless chief network officer, said Wednesday at Silverlinings’ Cloud-Native 5G Summit. Other experts warned that the cloud, and 5G, also present new security concerns with an expanded attack surface.

“We feel at home in the public cloud,” Rouanne said. Dish had to make the cloud “robust enough and teleco grade, but we’ve done that with a lot of success,” he said. Dish said two weeks ago it had met a June 14 FCC milestone, reaching 70% of the U.S. population (see 2306150010). Dish now has the largest open radio access network in the world, Rouanne said.

Dish is working with dozens of companies on its use of the cloud, Rouanne said. “We innovate at the speed of the cloud, which is so much faster than the innovation that we see in the teleco world,” he said: “That’s really what is making us different.” The network is being built using more than 15,000 “mini-edge data centers,” he said. The centers, located at the edge of the network close to customers, can be updated with whatever software Dish wants to install, from analytics to AI, he said.

Use of AI allows a provider to improve energy efficiency, shutting down unused radios, boost spectrum efficiency and enhance security, Rouanne said. “You see so much more of what is happening,” he said: “Instead of having a black box, you can manage. You see what’s happening inside” the network.

Carriers have to really understand all the new technology they’re dealing with, said Michela Menting, ABI Research senior research director. For the 5G core, “you have to think about the composite elements” and “how they interact with each other,” she said. Many of the concepts are based on the information technology world, she said.

There’s already a “body of security in the IT domain, so there’s no point reinventing the wheel, and we want to leverage those technologies,” Menting said. “But they need to be carefully balanced with the demands and priorities of a carrier network,” she said. Providers have to consider the demands and functioning of the entire network -- not just the core but also the edge, she said: “That will determine how you deploy IT technology and security within that. … It’s not just a copy and paste, you really have to adapt.”

The IoT's expected size means big challenges ahead, Menting said. Right now, the scale of IoT attacks isn’t as big as what’s seen in IT, she said. “As platforms become more widely used, they tend to attract more threat actors” and the bigger an ecosystem “the greater the target area for an attacker -- we see this in IT all the time,” she said. Hundreds of thousands of devices are in a private IoT network across a large geographic area, she said. “That’s a lucrative target, she said.

Companies will have to balance usability with security, Menting said. Companies want to make their IoT networks as secure as possible “but not to the extent that they’re unusable,” she said. Menting said she didn’t want to be a “doomsayer,” but companies need to be prepared for “the unknowns and the potential risks.”

Cities today are covered by “layers of clouds on top of clouds,” said John Yeoh, Cloud Security Alliance global vice president-research: “It could be cool, could be scary, depending on your perspective, because technology can be scary and complex sometimes.” The layers of cloud create questions for security professionals, he said.

The goal is to explore these technologies “and to understand how do those security objectives change for the technologies like cloud, 5G and even IoT,” Yeoh said. Companies have to update their security objectives for these new technologies and even use the new technologies to meet security goals, he said. “This architecture needs to be understood and controlled,” he said.

In 5G, providers have to pay attention to what they “actually carry” on their networks, said Stephane Teral, LightCounting chief analyst. “Today we are still in the early innings,” he said. “You’re going to have to pay attention to the traffic and protect that traffic,” he said. 5G has been sold as a way to “enable the connection of tons of devices everywhere,” he said: “The big issue is how each connection is protected” since each is “supporting a very particular use case.”