Industry trade group GSMA stated that more than 88,000 people attended its recent MWC Barcelona 2023 event, a number that might be hard to verify but seems legitimate considering the masses of people spread throughout the multiple halls of Barcelona’s cavernous Gran Via.

While attendance might not have matched the 109,000 people GSMA said had attended the last pre-Covid event in 2019, many in attendance were still amazed by the strong turnout for the mobile telecommunication industry’s largest annual event.

On this week’s SDxCentral 7 Layers podcast, I am joined by Reporter Julia King to take a look back at the MWC Barcelona 2023 event, highlighting some of the bigger news and trends to emerge from the show.

This includes:

• The network API push highlighted by GSMA’s Open Gateway initiative that has so far attracted nearly two-dozen operators and vendors attempting to squeeze more revenue from 5G networks.

• The differing dynamics between vendor heavyweights Ericsson, Huawei, and Nokia. Ericsson’s event splash was somewhat subdued due to ongoing operational challenges; Huawei looked to counter ongoing geopolitical struggles with sheer mass; and Nokia deconstructed its logo to emphasis its operating momentum.

• There was considerable open radio access network (RAN) news from the event, especially from European-based operators that have been aggressively trialing different open RAN solutions and have staked out deployment benchmarks.

• And what would a telecom focused event be without looking toward the future. In this case, it was expected benefits from soon-to-be-available 5G-Advanced specifications and further-down-the-road 6G technology. We are still at least a year away from the former, and at least five years away from the latter, but what fun is a trade show if you can’t dream a little.

We hope you enjoy this audio look back at the MWC Barcelona 2023 event, and make sure to check out all of our coverage of the show on our dedicated event page.

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The open radio access network (RAN) market recently gained significant U.S. government support when Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel touted open RAN as a way for operators to circumvent network equipment from China-based vendors like Huawei and ZTE.

Specifically, Rosenworcel noted the ability for open RAN technology to provide operators with greater access to more secure networking equipment. “In the long run, these systems can help diversify the technology in our networks and grow the market for more secure 5G equipment,” she stated during a speech at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event earlier this year.

The U.S. has earmarked billions of dollars to be used to help rip-and-replace existing network infrastructure from China-based vendors, including RAN equipment. The FCC had previously reported America’s wireless network infrastructure included at least 24,000 pieces of Huawei or ZTE equipment spanning about 8,400 locations.

Most of this work toward open RAN has been under the guidance of the O-RAN Alliance, which is an industry trade group working on technical specifications that foster greater adoption of open RAN equipment. However, that organization has been questioned for its inclusion of some members linked to organizations included on the U.S. Entity List that tracks organizations and individuals considered to support “activities contrary to U.S. national security and/or foreign policy interests.”

This issue at one point resulted in Nokia pausing activities with the O-RAN Alliance over concerns about Chinese members’ blacklisted status with the U.S. government. The O-RAN Alliance quickly adopted changes to its participation documents and procedures that brought Nokia back into the fold.

John Strand, CEO of Strand Consult, stated that this connection should raise concerns over the security structure of open RAN equipment.

“What I dislike is that open RAN has been marketed as an alternative to Chinese infrastructure,” Strand said. “Open RAN is just as Chinese as anything else. There’s 11 or 12 working committees in [O-RAN Alliance] and China Mobile is either the chair or the vice-chair of nine or 10 of them. China Mobile and 43 other Chinese companies on the U.S. Entity List are key stake holders in [O-RAN Alliance]. … That’s an issue.”

On this episode of the SDxCentral 7 Layers podcast, Strand provides more insight into those potential concerns and areas where other security challenges could impact the adoption of open RAN architectures.

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In this episode of the 7 Layers podcast, TJ Gonen, VP of Cloud Security at Check Point sat down with SDxCentral Editor Nancy Liu to delve into the ever-changing world of cloud security – specifically emerging trends in the evolution of the cloud threat landscape. Furthermore, we will explore how advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies, such as ChatGPT, are being utilized to enhance cloud security, and discuss the most promising AI and ML-based cloud security solutions.

Check Point Research recently reported a 48% year-over-year increase in cloud-based cyberattacks for 2022, as organizations increasingly move operations to the cloud.

“There are just way more cloud assets, so it's very natural for more attacks to happen on such a large estate,” Gonen told SDxCentral. “Another thing that's happening more and more, it's already a reality … is that more critical assets are moving to the cloud.”

“That speed of change and scale of cloud is the number one reason for this increase in cybersecurity attacks,” he added. “So, operationalizing cloud security at speed and scale and keeping up is going to continue to be the biggest challenge.”

AI and ML technologies can help address this issue as “[what] they are actually very good at is to move fast, is to automate stuff.”

The Check Point Research team recently published several studies into OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Codex. “[What] Codex and ChatGPT show to all of us is what AI can do now,” Gonen said. “It just showed what impact it can have on almost everything we do in life, not just the technology nerds.”

He noted Check Point has been using AI across the board for four years.

“When you connect the security solution, you might find yourself with thousands of alerts, and sometimes thousands of alerts is a bigger problem than no alerts,” Gonen said. “One of the ways that we're using, for example, machine learning and AI, is to take these alerts and instead of just throwing them at the user, we actually use machine learning and AI to prioritize and talk about or focus only on the risks that matter. ”

He also expects AI and ML technologies to replace some of the security layers that today are driven by humans. “For example, I think that we are maybe a year away from replacing, what's called in the security world, the tier-one analyst — the people who take alerts from a bunch of places and sit in a SOC and try to correlate them to understand what happens on the first tier.”

“That's perfect because you can focus more on the higher-skilled individuals,” Gonen added.

Listen to the full interview now.

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Chip Childers has been at VMware for six months, during which time he has focused on steering the vendor’s use and interaction of open source software platforms and refining its approach to supporting those efforts.

These are significant areas of interest for VMware and for Childers’ role as VP and chief open source officer at the vendor, which is increasingly interacting with the open source community.

“For projects that VMware hosts, we want to make sure that we're very welcoming to participants that want to collaborate with us, but also how do we engage in a really authentic way with open source communities that are out there, maybe at a foundation or owned by another vendor or just even a collective of individuals,” Childers said. “So we spent a lot of time on making sure that VMware has a very thoughtful community strategy and how it engages with these projects.”

Those comments build on what Childers said were his initial areas of focus when he took on the role last year. At that time, Childers repeatedly mentioned a need for VMware to be “intentional” with its interactions across the open source community.

This work also includes VMware exploring other open source opportunities that it can help foster and in turn help power new VMware services.

“We're exploring project communities, we're trying to make a very positive impact in those communities and, frankly, get to the point where those communities are generating software that we think is going to be useful for VMware, either internally or as part of our product strategy,” Childers added.

This includes a specific focus on operationalizing machine learning (ML). Childers mentioned projects like Kubeflow, which supports ML stacks running on Kubernetes. Kubeflow is currently under the guise of Google, but is working toward inclusion in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Childers also touched on the growing need for VMware to work on securing open source ML platforms. He described attack models that can add noise to an image in a way that can trick an ML model into thinking “a banana is an apple.”

To counter this, VMware is looking at different projects, with Childers citing the Adversarial Robustness Toolbox project that is currently on GitHub as a potential way to test various threats or attack vectors.

“As we look at it we see how important these operational attributes of machine learning are going to be to our customers and, frankly, to the industry writ large,” he added.

Listen to more of Childers’ insight into VMware’s areas of focus in the latest episode of the SDxCentral 7 Layers podcast.

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The 5G Open Innovation Lab is looking to help telecommunication operators and enterprises tap into the rapidly growing cloud and software developer ecosystem they know they need to tap into to reach their digital transformation goals.

Jim Brisimitizis, general partner at 5G Open Innovation Lab, explained that these efforts involve his organization acting as a central contact point between these industry segments, a task lightened by the group’s list of big-name segment players.

The 5G Open Innovation Lab was established in early 2020, and included founding partners Intel, NASA, and T-Mobile US. That group selected 17 start-up companies as initial members of its 12-week program that allowed them to tap into industry and financial resources to help them design and develop 5G and edge applications targeted at enterprise digital transformation goals.

Brisimitizis noted this work is most transformational for communication service provider (CSPs) that could be most challenged by this cloud evolution.

“The lab was really born from the standpoint of exposing the CSP markets to a very vibrant and always moving software development ecosystem, i.e. startups. Expose them to a network of fairly large global platforms like Microsoft, and VMware, and Dell, and Intel, and Amdocs, and others, and then also exposing them to a set of enterprises who are on these digital transforming journeys,” Brisimitzis said. “And by exposing them they see both the opportunity, they see both how their networks could potentially integrate into the fabric of IT platforms from around the world, i.e. the partners that we have, and then they would see that demand from the enterprises too.”

The group’s timing also aligns with the broader industry trend of migrating network resources to a cloud environment using cloud-native principles like containers that can better serve 5G-based edge use cases.

“The timing is coming more in line with the opportunity than it was in the past,” Brisimitzis said. “In the past, where it was simply co-hosting or colocating of server infrastructure, power, cooling, and connectivity, is now surpassed to a function of, hey, software development is going in one direction, the cloud’s already a foregone conclusion, it's here to stay, the edges is going to be real. There's a whole slew of use cases that are going to require more and more proximity computing, i.e. edge, and the carriers have two really important ingredients in that mix. They have real-estate locations and they have spectrum.”

Listen to more of Brisimitzis’ insight into this 5G and edge opportunity for telecom operators and vendors in the latest episode of the SDxCentral 7 Layers podcast.

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Dell Technologies’ Dennis Hoffman has spent the past three years refining his company’s growing focus on the 5G telecommunications space. A refinement that has been bolstered by the growing adoption of open and cloud-native architectures that Dell Technologies has been infusing throughout its broader ecosystem.

“We've been focused almost exclusively from the beginning on helping people embrace open network architectures and monetizing them,” Hoffman said in an interview with SDxCentral.

Hoffman, who is SVP and GM for Dell Technologies’ Telco Systems business, explained that this was an important challenge for the telecommunications space that has historically been averse to big technology swings.

“If it's your job to run a network that can never go down – and only got more important during the pandemic – you have to be careful about the ways you do it,” Hoffman said. “It's an opportunity, though, for a company like Dell as cloud native, and industry standard, and all the stuff – all the the buzzwords that dominate it – start to get utilized in the design of telecommunications networks, it creates a massive opportunity for somebody like us.”

Dell Technologies has slowly been chopping away at these opportunities, using its legacy knowledge in data centers and servers to help operators construct and run open systems to power their 5G core and edge networks. This has allowed the vendor to gain traction in both brownfield network deployments and greenfield operators like Dish Network.

“There's this move from closed architectures and legacy technologies to all the new software defined, cloud-native industry standard stuff, [and it’s] well and good, but if it's all delivered by a group of vendors that you can't count on to be around in five years, it's very hard for them to adopt,” Hoffman said. “One of the pieces of feedback we get all the time is our scale, our global reach, and our financial stability are really important decisions for them as they kind of figure out how they move from where they are today to where they want to be and more fully embrace digital transformation.”

Looking ahead, Hoffman said one area of focus will be on the growing push toward the network edge, which is a space telecom operators should be ideally positioned in to gain significant market presence.

“All that edge real estate owned by the world's telecoms is really priceless real estate, frankly,” Hoffman said. “We felt like it was very much aligned with what we're trying to do to help enable edge computing. And it's not going to be easy for us to do that ff we don't have much deeper, stronger, more powerful relationships with the world's network operators. For those reasons we kind of entered the space and found pretty quick that the focus areas that needed help. We're taking open technologies and pulling them together into systems that telcos can rely on.”

Listen to more of Hoffman’s insight into the market, the challenging vendor dynamics, and where operators are focused moving forward in the latest episode of the SDxCentral 7 Layers podcast.

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Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs recently released its predictions for 2023, highlighting the trend of advanced persistent cybercrime enabling a new wave of destructive attacks at scale, fuelled by cybercrime as a service.

In this episode of the 7 Layers, Derek Manky, chief security strategist and VP of global threat intelligence at FortiGuard Labs, sat down with SDxCentral editor Nancy Liu to discuss security trends.

Manky and the team at the labs have seen cyberattacks become more destructive in nature this year, as well as the emergence of reconnaissance-as-a-service.

Ransom-as-a-service in particular involves more destructive attacks, “so it’s becoming more bold,” he said, adding that “reconnaissance-as-a-service … we have not really seen this yet, but it’s something I expect to see in 2023.”

The labs also saw cybercrime converging with advanced persistent threat methods in 2022. Manky explained that advanced persistent cybercrime combines advanced persistent threat (APT), which has traditionally been used by nation-states to target critical infrastructure, with cybercrime that is financially motivated.

“We’re seeing a PTS of nation-state groups now teaming up with cybercriminal groups,” Manky said. “So In the private sector, I see them now worried about APT they were not before because APT groups teaming up with cybercrime groups, those destructive targeted threats are now hitting the private sector. It’s the same thing on the public sector side. They typically have only been worried about APT, but now they are also expanding their focus to cybercrime because it’s shared infrastructure and those groups are working together and the attacks are becoming highly targeted.”

“So in the private sector, I see them now worried about APT that they weren’t before because APT groups are teaming up with cybercriminal groups, these destructive targeted threats are now hitting the private sector. It’s the same on the public sector side. They used to just worry about APT, but now they’re widening their focus to cybercrime because it’s a shared infrastructure and these groups are working together and the attacks are becoming very targeted”.

Advanced persistent cybercrime “is our single biggest threat to expect in 2023 and beyond,” he added.

To mitigate these threats, Manky is encouraging organizations to use solutions and principles such as artificial intelligence, security-as-a-service, secure access service edge (SASE), zero trust, and zero-trust networks access (ZTNA).

“Cybercriminals are using artificial intelligence, so we need to on the defensive side do that to cybersecurity teams, so leveraging automation, orchestration, AI power, and security operations is a big effective measure that can go a long way without having to hire headcount and increase your opex,” he said.

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The radio access network (RAN) is central to a wireless network deployment. It’s the physical pieces of equipment we all see out in the wild, sometimes standing proudly and showing off its various antennas, sometimes being shy and trying to hide as a pine tree.

But as these RAN networks continue to evolve based on the latest 5G standards, they are being pruned by virtualized (vRAN) and open RAN platforms designed to provide easier management and control. The next step in this process is the use of a RAN intelligent controller (RIC) to provide operators with a way to manage these vRAN and open RAN systems on a per-bit and per-sector basis.

The RIC operates in the middle of a RAN deployment as a kind of linkage to the wider network. It allows operators to deploy xApps and rApps that then allow operators to design and control RAN functions, providing administrative RAN sovereignty over functions that are typically implemented as proprietary features on base stations. These “apps” are microservices-based applications operating in near-real time (xApps) and non-real time (rApps) that provide an operator with more control over their open RAN environments.

RIC development has steadily gained attention from vendors looking to help operators manage their growing RAN infrastructure. VMware, for instance, recently added Viavi Solutions to its RIC ecosystem, bringing standardized framework and metric testing to its platform.

Juniper Networks has also been making progress in the RIC space. Japan’s Rakuten Symphony late last year selected the vendor’s RIC platform as the sole selection as part of the Rakuten Symworld Platform. The vendor has also conducted a multivendor RIC trial with European telecom giant Vodafone and open RAN provider Parallel Wireless.

Jai Thattil, senior director and head of service provider strategic marketing at Juniper Networks, joined us on the latest SDxCentral 7 Layers podcast to provide more details into the vendor’s RIC work, what has gone into developing a RIC platform to work across vendors and operators, and challenges still facing the still maturing ecosystem.

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The SDxCentral ecosystem witnessed significant change in 2022, highlighted by ongoing cybersecurity attacks, the proliferation of new networking technologies, and industry changing merger and acquisition activity. Basically, another year at the office.

The SDxCentral editorial staff sat down before the year ticked over to discuss what they found to be the biggest news and trends across their respective beats in 2022. While the sound quality might indicate that conversation was secretly recorded, rest assured we all knew what was up.

Reporter Tommy Clift led off, touching on the rapid perception evolution blockchain technology went through in 2022, moving away from its association with the troubling cryptocurrency space to being used in commercial situations by established telecommunication players.

Editor Nancy Liu had an exceptionally busy year covering the cybersecurity space for SDxCentral. Liu touched on near non-stop cyberattacks that hit some of the industry’s biggest names, including Uber, Microsoft, Okta, and Cisco. These attacks also targeted soft targets like city governments and school districts.

Liu also highlighted the ongoing adoption of zero-trust network access (ZTNA) platforms that overtook rival cybersecurity acronyms for buzz in 2022. This was helped by the late-year push by the White House to deploy ZTNA principles across government agencies.

Reporter Emma Chervek hit on the ongoing developer talent shortage challenge facing the software and cloud ecosystem, which remains a challenge in this post-pandemic environment. Chervek noted this challenge led to increased attention for low-code and no-code platforms designed to lower the barrier for application development.

SDxCentral Editorial Assistant Julia King injected some sassy commentary on the secure access service edge (SASE), which continued to grow in 2022. The SASE space hit a level of maturity that has vendors now looking to differentiate through all-inclusive offerings instead of past partnerships, which itself could lead to greater industry consolidation in 2023.

And finally, Executive Editor Dan Meyer touched on the surging attention placed on private networks, which vendors and operators think could prove a compelling 5G enterprise use case. More ominously, Meyer noted Broadcom’s pending $69 billion acquisition of VMware could cause significant ripples across the cloud and virtualization space.

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Palo Alto Networks Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Niall Browne sat down with SDxCentral Editor Nancy Liu in Las Vegas during the company’s Ignite event to discuss how Palo Alto Networks secures the company itself and its customers using its own zero-trust network access (ZTNA 2.0), secure access service edge (Prisma Access), cloud security (Prisma Cloud), and autonomous security operation center (Cortex XSIAM) products, the unique challenges it faces to secure one of the largest security companies in the world, and what keeps Browne up at night.

Palo Alto Networks is transitioning to a platform approach for security that includes its next-generation firewalls, zero trust-based authentication, and SASE services. Browne believes next-generation ZTNA and SASE are the answer to securing a hybrid workforce.

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