Security: The Next Big Play for Carriers: The playbook for carriers has changed a lot over the years: from single play (voice) to double play (+ Internet/data), triple play (+ television) and quad-play (+ mobile). With more enterprises and employees working from home, there is now a new addition to the “Quad Squad” for carriers: security services. After all, shouldn’t the company delivering voice, Internet, video and mobile data also be the one to secure those services?

While carriers have a lot of experience in securing their own networks, securing their customers’ networks has often been an afterthought. Many carriers bundled firewall services with their SIP trunks, but they didn’t have the security expertise or resources to offer enterprise customers a full security stack. Privafy is changing that by putting its security expertise and technology to work for carriers through a cloud-based, security stack as a service. With Privafy, carriers can leverage the cloud to protect data in motion at the network edge—both their edge and their customer’s edge—through a full portfolio of cloud-based services that includes firewall protection, malware detection, intrusion prevention and more.

The definition of the network edge has shifted dramatically in recent years. For carriers, multi-access edge computing (MEC) has moved the edge away from the core and closer to the service consumer. Moving security services to this “new” edge provides lower latencies and can increase complexity.     By hosting the security stack in the cloud, carriers and their customers get the best of both worlds: dynamic, on-demand security that can be set up in minutes; simple, centralized management; customizable policy enforcement via network slices; built-in redundancy;  fast, scalable performance; amid broad geographic reach.

But what about the consumer’s edge? In the era of COVID, many enterprises have moved to a majority-remote model that allows employees to work from home—a trend that was already underway and which the pandemic has accelerated. This shift has, in effect, dispersed the enterprise network edge from a single point of entry to hundreds (or thousands) of points of entry. Unfortunately, remote workers typically have little more than software-based firewalls, anti-virus software, moderately effective encryption and a handful of passwords to protect them.

To better secure this edge, Privafy has embedded its cloud-based security stack into carrier-supplied modems and routers to protect the broadly dispersed enterprise edge of today.This means no additional hardware has to be deployed, no software has to be managed (it’s automatically and centrally managed in the cloud) and no integration is needed because both the carrier and consumer edge points are using the same technology. Privafy’s unique “inside the box” thinking is a potential game-changer for carriers that are looking to increase their enterprise market share and provide value-added services to home-based subscribers. At the same time, Privafy’s technology allows enterprises and subscribers to control, configure and customize their security services for different traffic flows, whether it’s a retailer assigning higher security levels for digital payment flows or a parent setting parental controls for a child’s mobile device.

With 5G expected to go mainstream over the next few years, mobile users will be consuming more video and data than ever before. Enterprises and subscribers would almost certainly be willing to pay a little more for secure mobile video and data—particularly as video conferences, cloud-based business applications and mobile text/email become the norm. And they’ll be more likely to purchase those services from a trusted partner, especially if it means not adding more hardware or updating and managing those services themselves.

We believe security-as-a-service is the next big play for carriers. The question is, how will you get there: by building and paving a path on your own, or by simply entering onto a highway that’s already been built? The road to security revenue doesn’t have to wait.  Connect with Privafy today to discover how easy it is to add security services to your revenue playbook.

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