In The Arena by TechArena - Delivering Security at the Edge with Radware

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

TechArena host Allyson Klein chats with Radware CTO David Aviv about the unique challenges of securing the edge and how his company is shaping security solutions to minimize attack threats.

Welcome to the Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Alison Klein. Now, let's step into the arena. Welcome to the Tech Arena. My name is Alison Klein, and today I'm coming live from the World Congress with David Aviv, CTO of Radware. Welcome to the program. Hi, thank you for having me. So David, first, thank you for taking some time out of your busy schedule at MWC to be with us. Why don't we just start with an introduction of

Radware and your role at the companies. Hi, Radware is an international leader with security solutions, network protection solutions, as well as application security solutions, covering network protection, data center protection, public and private accounts. Tecarina has been doing a number of interviews about the proliferation of the edge and the edge of the network, including numbers of interviews at MWC. And I was really interested in talking to Radware about how

to secure all of this data. Why don't we start with a question on how do you view the edge, and where do you see the most adoption of edge computing today? Well it's an excellent question because edge becomes a very amorphic term. I mean depending on everyone's definition of what is actually an edge. So classically everyone talks about edge, cloud, edge compute, network edge. Edge is becoming everything. The reason is very simple because everything is disaggregated and distributed. So edge becomes the point of presence where you locate either network resources, data resources,

whole edge resources, compute resources, you name it. I would say that currently, especially now in Barcelona, the 5G edge compute or mobile edge compute is definitely one of the best places which are more a couple of hotspots especially for mobile application get perusing that kind of edge service however we need to understand that we talk of edge as an edge. In order to run applications effectively, application needs to be built for to run, namely the backend, the edge, et cetera, where you store the critical data, the state-sensitive data.

So there are a lot of trade-offs. Let's say mobile, so-called mobile, the car industry, the next generation, mobile cars, so-called. We need to engineer the applications that are running, and to run what is needed to be running, to run at the edge, to run at the back. So definitely edge computing is starting to take a toll in the mobile edge, the mobile cloud as well, because the cloud pops are everywhere. And we do see that modern applications are restructuring

to be able to run at the edge. And the edge is not a new thing, like single-visibility content delivery. It's basically accelerating through the edge access. So edge becomes everywhere. And that provides new opportunities, but also new challenges, like security challenges. Well, that's why I'm here. And you deliver security solutions from cloud to edge.

Obviously, a lot of attention has been given to cloud security over the last 15 years. But edge security is a different beast. How do you view this, and how does that inform the decisions that you're making with your team about the security solutions you're bringing to market? Yeah, that's obviously the fact that the perimeter is being blurred, actually.

There's a whole perimeter, a certain perimeter. And it's to rethink how you define, let's say, not, I don't like to call it differential

matter, but a different kind of thing. So, there are a couple

of approaches to deal with it, and especially when the content delivery is

distributed through the supply chain, and through the supply chain, especially for web-based application.

You know, the browser, the consumer browser is connected directly to the supply chain contents anywhere actually, so pushes the security to the edge and when we say to the edge, up to the consumer itself, to the browser itself. So there are a couple of things. People like to say that identity forms the new perimeter. So what do we mean by identity? And the consumers, you know, in the enterprise is a well-known part, I'm the zero-trust part. Understandable. So we are building new security solutions to cope with this threat in order to build and establish an identity on the consumers, on the browsers, to be able to run and provide such tracking capability and a professionalization capability to be able to apply and detect

abnormal activities anywhere and behind any perimeter you access. Wow, okay. Tell me about the solutions that you brought to market and what has been the market response to them? Okay, so at the network, we are leading from the denial of service, protective networks, service provider networks, with large tier ones. And we are adding to that kind of service,

a new form of distributed line of service, once again, because of the distribution of the networks. This is on the application and application protection. We are providing now a new stack, a new stack. We like to call it providing a best-of-breed components to a best-of-sweet. While the layers, the security layers and the stack contain today application, seven details, anti bot protection, web application file, and API protection. So where brings four layers, packaging is one stack.

If you remember, we talked about identity. Identity, use crypto identity. Identity. Whose crypto identity? It's a cross, I call it, a cross layer anchor for our behavioral anomaly detection across all the stock. What has the market response been to the solutions?

And have you heard anything interesting from customers at Mobile World about things that are on their mind that maybe the industry hasn't paid attention to oh i think that everyone are coming now limit a lot of both enterprise customers they are building their 5g private so-called the private shop shop in Lebanon, obviously service provider abiding the core and 5G public. I would say that everyone now, especially the last year with the political tensions, CGPT coming and providing many new opportunities

probably for the healthcare community. Sure. and Chagipiti coming and providing many, many new opportunities, probably for the hacker community. Sure. Everyone starts to understand that usually every year we always say this is an inflection. I see something smelling there that this year is the real inflection. We pay a lot of attention on that one, and especially on publicly exposed web resources, where everyone understands that exposing everything will be open up to the media,

attack surface. And people understand that, especially those that are dealing now with the 5G private sector. Bringers of enterprise resources build on utilizing 5G, slicing technology for providing by service providers. You talked about some of the industry standards that are driving this space. Do you think that there's any industry standard of work that needs to be done

to address any of the attack challenges that we're still facing? Look, you know, some standards, let's say, built in to the 5G standards. We are talking in the 5G now. I think the 6G will address some of the others. Yeah, because always there will be a lag between the general telco community and protecting the network towards the new attack surfaces. And I think even in the 5G, there was no wind shift in the security technology, that especially when you listen to the 5G standalone, which the primary use case is enterprise,

is that the 5G and the 6G definitely is actually utilizing almost web-based protocols. All the 5G core, it says, is based on HTTP-based protocols. Right. Not the access office. It's still the traditional. It opens up. Yeah, sure.

The web-based attacks offices. I don't think that it's up to mine taking care of us, you know, enough. And I think we need to pay more attention to it. As you look forward into 2023, what are the key things that you're looking for in the market in terms of the continued adoption within customers? And are there any headwinds that we're facing? I think more and more, let's take example, the 5G.

The Kubernetes takes over data center technology. Technology, Kubernetes implementation, the microservices implementation. So if you go to the tool from the RIC, the radio intelligent controller, you will have their XAMPS running in Kubernetes. Then they go to the edge compute. They will have their application running in Kubernetes. And you go into the 5G control SBA.

Everything is running Kubernetes. So I think in that sense, everyone understands that the security for running those applications needs to have two things. It needs to be able to run as a Kubernetes citizen in order to protect those applications. And secondly, be able to cope with the cadence of this application, of those applications. Those applications are running and changing very fast. Security needs to adapt and want and adapt very fast to adapt the security model to the image that runs in those containers. So there are new trends in the security itself and those are some of the key things that we do see. Besides that, remember, security is now downloaded as software. It's a software.

We write from the CI-CD pipeline. So the same way you download the image, the application image, we have built our security to run the same way from the CI CD pipeline adapted to the image running into the to the cluster. David, I really enjoyed the conversation and I've learned a lot about Redware and security at the edge. So thank you for the time. I'm sure my listeners are also intrigued. Where can they find out more information about the company and touch your team? Radware, www.radware.com. We have a sales force all over the globe, especially in North America.

So through that, you can find a lot of information, contact our sales team, and we will be more than happy to come and support you. Thank you, and have a great Mobile World Congress. Thank you very much. Thanks for joining the Tech Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website, thetecharena.net. All content is copyright by The Tech Arena.