Syniverse aims to help MNOs offer new, secure enterprise and IoT services
Syniverse is offering a new, secure network-as-a-service aimed at helping mobile network operators offer secure internet of things, network and application services.
The new Syniverse Secure Global Access builds on Syniverse’ position as a company that sits between MNOs in the network ecosystem, as a provider of interconnection, according to Syniverse CTO Chris Rivera. The company already has five customers utilizing the secure network offering, including financial services firms.
“The internet wasn’t designed to be a secure environment,” said Rivera. “The environment is such that businesses across the board, in many different verticals … really require a more secure network, and Syniverse launching this Secure Global Access really addresses that need for our partner MNOs and enterprises, and gives us the capability to really add value.”
Rivera said that secure messaging and secure IoT deployments are two of the possibilities that the network could support. He added that Syniverse expects that in some cases, either due to regulations or simply industry needs, a global private network will be a critical foundation for IoT. Meanwhile, he noted, operators are trying to expand their relationships with enterprise verticals.
“The enterprise has been a growth area for MNOs for quite some time, and I think it’s becoming more and more critical,” Rivera said. He pointed to two key trends: MNOs need to expand their services to grow their businesses, and enterprises need to take a mobile-first approach to grow their own operations. But when it comes to IoT — which is at the intersection of those two trends — security concerns are top-of-mind and can be a barrier to IoT adoption.
“What Iot does in a digital world is, it really increases the overall attack surface of that service by introducing tens of thousands to millions, potentially to billions, of devices over a network — and that’s why you want that network to be state of the art, relative to security [and] completely isolated from the internet,” Rivera said.
The secure network offering leverages software-defined networking, Rivera added.
“We’re able to leverage SDN to extend (our) capabilities beyond the global interconnection and peering points to enterprises, securely, and then offer services,” Rivera said. He said that SDN means streamlining the extension to the enterprise, whether on-premise or in a company data center.
Rivera said that the services MNOs offer to enterprises currently, are often provided between carrier data centers or points of presence and enterprise data centers and are application-to-application focused. Many applications need to hosted regionally or locally in order to get the required performance and latency, Rivera said, and SDN “gives us a secure, very agile approach to address those requirements” as well as to “turn up capacity and capabilities through easier provisioning across many different mediums.”
Both MNOs and enterprise IT teams are increasingly comfortable with and familiar with SDN, Rivera said, and the new Syniverse offering also taps into the growing interest in mobile edge computing within the MNO network architecture as well as within the enterprise.
