Nokia tackles 5G and IoT security with its new security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) lineup.

Mary O’Neill, VP of security for Nokia Software, says the new product suite, called NetGuard Adaptive Security Operations, closes a gap in the vendor’s security portfolio for communication service providers.

“This is completing the end-to-end picture,” she told SDxCentral. “We have a very comprehensive security portfolio all defined for critical infrastructure.”

But Nokia’s SOAR piece was missing, she added. And the tools it provides — using automation, analytics, and machine learning to respond to increasingly sophisticated and numerous security events — become more important as operators deploy 5G networks and enterprises connect more and more devices to these networks.

“That’s one of the reasons we decided to invest in the SOAR space,” O’Neill said. “We really need to automate and also take action.”

Nokia’s latest Threat Intelligence Report, published earlier this year, saw a huge jump in the number of IoT devices connected to service providers’ networks — and the percentage of botnet activity associated with those devices.

“About a year and a half ago, most of the malware was coming from mobile devices,” O’Neill said. But then in the 2019 report, “we saw shift where basically 16% of the devices we are monitoring are IoT devices, and 78% of the malware we are monitoring comes from those devices. Then you add 5G, and the enablement of billions of IoT devices, and that becomes a bigger challenge.”

The well-documented shortage of security professionals compounds this problem, and “we felt we needed a new form of security management,” O’Neill said. Service providers are already using several security tools. They need to orchestrate these products, collect data from multiple sources, and respond to security events quickly using automation, she added. This is why SOAR is important and expected to become more widely used in the near future.

A recent Gartner market report forecasts that by the end of 2022, 30% of organizations with a security team larger than five people will leverage SOAR tools in their security operations, up from less than 5% today.

The NetGuard Adaptive Security Operations product suite includes the NetGuard Security Management Center, which provides a real-time view across a network; NetGuard Certificate Lifecycle Manager, which centrally controls the process of verifying, for example, that a person at one end of a connection is really who they say they are; and NetGuard Endpoint Security, which aims to stop threats before they become data breaches.

As with all of Nokia’s security software, the NetGuard Adaptive Security Operations products are hardware and cloud agnostic. The products are available now, and O’Neill said “major tier-one service providers” have already trialed and purchased the software. “They are using it in their SOC [security operations center].”

The product launch follows a week of Nokia beating the 5G security drum at MWC Los Angeles and in a blog post by CEO Rajeev Suri.