Mobile Operators Working with A10 have Future Proofed Their Networks as Mainstream Adoption of 5G Starts to Transform Markets

San Jose, Calif., Dec. 11, 2019 — A10 Networks (NYSE: ATEN) today announced its Orion 5G Security Suite, which enables mobile carriers and service providers to be ready for the business transformation 5G and NFV brings. The suite allows customers to meet the requirements needed today and helps them future proof their networks for tomorrow by delivering security, scalability, agility and analytics, while integrating with an industry-leading partner ecosystem. A10 brings unique expertise from working with many of the production 5G networks that are now operational around the world.

A10 Networks has been at the forefront of initial 5G rollouts with tier-one carriers worldwide and is working with many others to plan for their future 5G initiatives. With the announcement of the 5G Orion Security Suite, service providers have a proven comprehensive suite of secure applications services that have been engineered for cloud-native architecture to aid in making their 5G and NFV strategies successful. The Orion 5G Security Suite enables advanced security and reliability functions as individual services by modularizing and offering them as a service layer with a set of connected technologies that employ automated intelligence, machine learning and centralized visibility and control.

Partnering with tier-one operators, A10 has honed its solutions to meet the critical 5G requirements for improved security, reliability and performance learned from 5G network rollouts over the last year. A10 provides an interconnected suite – virtual or physical – resulting in lower latency, larger scale, higher reliability and lower TCO—all of which have been required for the emerging 5G use cases customers are enabling.

In the last year to 18 months, first movers have deployed the first wave of 5G networks and demonstrated improved customer satisfaction and increased average revenue per user (ARPU), despite an increase in network demands, including higher data usage and download rates.

“A10’s commitment to overcoming the challenges of network operators is evidenced by our announcement of the Orion 5G Security Suite and accompanying ACOS® 5.1 release with key architectural changes that meet the KPIs operators require in their new software-only deployments,” said Dhrupad Trivedi, president and CEO of A10 Networks. “We have partnered with key technology providers and have delivered on a comprehensive set of solutions to uniquely enable 5G networks. The rising tide of proven production deployments across multiple continents demonstrates that A10 is best-positioned to address new market needs.”

The Orion 5G Security Suite addresses existing and emerging mobile network architecture requirements for agility, consolidated services, greater scale, and lower latency communications across the Gi-LAN, virtualized evolved packet core (vEPC), and multi-access edge computing (MEC) environments. The Orion 5G Security Suite’s disaggregated, cloud-native security services provide agility while maintaining scale and performance by leveraging cutting-edge technologies. It also goes beyond just protecting the data plane through a GiFW by adding protection for the control plane and signaling plane with full visibility.

The Orion 5G Security Suite represents a major evolution of the company’s 5G strategy outlined in late 2018 by providing a comprehensive solution for mobile operators and other service providers to successfully deploy 5G non-standalone (NSA) and standalone (SA) solutions at hyperscale for 5G devices and new NFVi requirements.

  • 4G to 5G standard compatibility and investment protection: A10 supports existing 4G and 3G network architectures and use cases for the Gi-LAN and EPC, while meeting the more demanding requirements for 5G architectures, including the cloud-native agility needed for MEC. These solutions can be deployed in today’s infrastructure but are future proofed for successful 5G deployments. This includes functional consolidation for application visibility and control, subscriber-aware intelligent traffic steering, Gi/SGi firewall with carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT), GTP/SCTP firewall, integrated DDoS for frequently attacked services, intelligent traffic steering and more.
  • Scale for increased subscriber demand: 5G demands are inherently different than 4G, with smaller packet sizes, more throughput, and higher concurrent session counts. A10 solutions can scale concurrent sessions to multi-billion levels and throughput to multi-terabit levels in a scale-out cluster. 5G deployments can benefit from compact and efficient options, for example, 385 Gbps in compact physical network functions (PNFs), or high-performance 180 Gbps virtual network functions (VNFs) and cloud-native network functions (CNFs). Support for Kubernetes and Docker containers are available now. The compact PNF form factors and very high-performance software offerings (including containerized) are especially beneficial in emerging MEC use cases where space and power are at a premium.
  • Core infrastructure security: With new user-plane and control-plane security requirements coupled with the increased attack surface and scale brought by 5G and IoT device proliferation, more advanced, scalable and automated approaches are needed. To guarantee uptime and ensure control- and user-plane security, components include edge firewall, GTP firewall, Gi/SGi firewall, control- and user-plane policy enforcement, DNS protection, RAN security gateways (SeGW), and more. Additionally, A10’s advanced DDoS protection solution includes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities with its Zero-day Attack Protection (ZAP), continuous base lining, and One-DDoS for distributed intelligence. This provides full visibility into all packets versus traditional sample-based-only solutions. Network-wide ML-powered DDoS detection and mitigation for in-house protection can also be offered as a customer scrubbing service.
  • NFV for agile infrastructure: A10’s solutions can be delivered in a variety of form factors to meet the demands of the emerging NFVi architecture including, VNFs, CNFs, bare metal and PNFs. These solutions are integrated with leading NFVi architectures and interoperate with multiple MANO environments for faster network roll-out and optimized performance and agility. A10 also provides flexible software licensing and consumption with FlexPool® subscription-based capacity pooling licensing.
    Orchestration and analytics for lower TCO and reduced downtime: A10 Harmony Controller® provides actionable intelligence to manage subscriber services, meet law enforcement agency mandates and compliance, and deliver per-subscriber analytics. Harmony Controller provides visibility, management, orchestration and automation. Coordination of distributed One-DDoS data from all the Orion 5G Security Suite solutions is seamlessly orchestrated from the integrated aGalaxy® TPS system.
  • Ecosystem partners for a broader solution: A10’s products integrate with multiple third-party solutions and vendors, ranging from DevOps tools, such as Ansible, to providers of 5G solutions such as Ericsson, Red Hat, NEC, Tech Mahindra and Lenovo.

A10’s solutions continue to evolve with emerging 5G, public interoperability testing and related standards specified by the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSMA), Linux Foundation, International Telecommunication Union (ITU), 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), and others. A10 recently publicly demonstrated the Orion 5G Security Suite with a fully containerized carrier-class firewall with CGNAT in an end-to-end 5G non-stand-alone (NSA) network, collaboratively with the Linux Foundation and Red Hat, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon.

The legacy security services cannot cope with the exploding scale of new 5G and IoT threats. The A10 Orion 5G Security Suite leverages automation and big data models via enhanced ML and AI for more autonomous network operations. A10’s management and controller technologies are key foundations delivering on this requirement.

Availability
The Orion 5G Security Suite, available now, consists of the integrated A10 Harmony Controller, Thunder® CFW and Thunder TPS solutions. Thunder CFW ACOS 5.1 is available in December 2019.

Video demonstration of the Thunder CFW Container solution

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About A10 Networks
A10 Networks (NYSE: ATEN) enables service providers, cloud providers and enterprises to ensure their 5G networks and multi-cloud applications are secure. With advanced analytics, machine learning and intelligent automation, business-critical applications are protected, reliable and always available. Founded in 2004, A10 Networks is based in San Jose, Calif. and serves customers in 117 countries worldwide. For more information, visit: a10networkspub.wpenginepowered.com and @A10Networks.

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The A10 logo, A10 Networks, Thunder, ACOS, Harmony Controller, aGalaxy, FlexPool and Reliable Security Always are trademarks or registered trademarks of A10 Networks, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.