NEW DELHI: Indian telecomoperators need to make more investments in ensuring that security is built into all of their products, especially in the 5Gscenario, Reliance Jio’s chief information security officer, Brijesh Datta said.

5G technology, the executive said, will empower hackers to easily flood servers with enormous bandwidth at their disposal, thereby attacks would be more drastic. “These things need to be considered very closely. Now, our investments and security really need to go up,” he added.

The executive said that there is need to adopt advanced technologies like Software Defined Networking and Networks Functions Virtualisation that will allow telcos to up their security play to combat cyber threats. These technologies will also help them offer security services for retail and enterprise customers.

“The modern-day 5G technologies like SDN and NFV can really help customers with features like network protection or parental control. With virtualization technology, we can give different functionalities like firewall on demand to enterprises, which might have different requirements,” Datta, told ET, in a recent interaction.

With virtualised network architecture, a telco can launch a service in a couple of months and can even become a marketplace of services such as video streaming, cloud services, security and firewall services.

“For instance, you would have seen Jio offers most of the content like videos etc on clouds on a CDN which are very close to the customer. Similarly, going further, we will be able to offer security controls to our customers as close as possible and from the network area,” Datta added.

Reliance Jio, he said, is already working with the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) for the Cyber Swachhta Exercise.

“Anytime we get an alert that there is some customer’s SIM is infected, we send out alerts along with certain ‘please visit website’ content and download whatever malware controls you need and tools also,” he said, adding that the telco is doing its bit to increase awareness around security among customers.

Datta further said that customer awareness has now become crucial with uptake of Internet of Things (IoT) products at homes as these devices can be hacked. “This is going to increase dramatically once you have IoT invading at homes with wearables sensors and etc,” he said.

Telecom operators are now mulling over building Internet of Things (IoT) networks in India. Datta said that SDN and NFV technologies will also help telcos protect their IoT networks by offering features like firewalling, malware control, load balancing, intrusion protection.

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