Making 5G Ready to Live on The Edge

Edge IT is diverse, distributed, and largely siloed. With OT in the network that involves sensors, IoT devices etc., we need coordination with mobile service providers, communications service providers, cloud SPs and enterprises. Edge IT/OT runs on heterogenous compute architectures with some functionality on-premises and some hosted. It may involve different cloud providers. Compute may include standard x86, cloud IaaS and PaaS, and bare metal. For different industry verticals there are different edge types, at high level you can call it far edge, edge and regional edge. More specifically they can be further categorized as telco edge, device edge, critical communication edge, enterprise edge or industrial edge. Each edge type may represent a different use case and different risk for cyber-attack. Key Takeaways: • In a distributed network you want to have Observability and robust security tooling to detect and monitor the issue. In general, we want to be more proactive than reactive in securing the distributed network. • Use of technologies such as Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DTL) for cloud native security is being considered as well. • In our world today we have defined ownerships of the networks, i.e. mobile network is owned by MNOs like T-Mobile, ATT and Verizon. Enterprise IT networks are owned by enterprises. It will change as we define and build edge centric networks involving multiple industries, cloud SPs, mobile SPs. Management approaches for multi- stakeholder cloud native networks will become essential. Making all the applications and services work across multi cloud infrastructure, managing them, configuring them in an automated and secure way will be important.