Overview

SDN and NFV technologies offer communications service providers and network operators many operational and business benefits, including reduced operational costs through simplified network management and increased revenue streams by offering virtualized IT services to enterprise customers.

However, the deployment of SDN and NFV infrastructures exposes service providers to a range of cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Unlike traditional communications networks, which are closed infrastructures protected by mature security solutions, SDN and NFV networks are open, software-based and designed to be programmed and controlled remotely. This creates inherent security vulnerabilities, including ongoing threats of hacking, malware and other cybersecurity related attacks.

Telco Systems’ NFV CyberGuard solution consists of advanced network monitoring sensors embedded on a virtualization platform, a big data analytics engine and an SDN controller. NFV CyberGuard’s advanced network monitoring sensors continuously gather routing and application-level session information from across the entire network and organize an ongoing database of expected network behavior. This information is then fed into a big data analytics engine, which uses behavioral anomaly detection algorithms as well as explicit security policies to monitor and alert in real-time for anomalous network behaviors or control plane attacks, such as Advance Persistent Threats (APTs), flooding and direct denial of service (DDoS) attempts on the network function virtualization infrastructure (NFVI), remote access threats and specific attacks on the application (VMs) plane and spoofing attacks on all open network layers.
When anomalies are identified, NFV CyberGuard instantaneously activates the SDN controller to apply predefined policies and take immediate network-wide action to neutralize threats before they cause damage.

By running NFV CyberGuard as a network function virtualization (NFV), the solution provides security professionals with advanced detection forensics and a real-time monitoring and analysis of network threats, complete visibility of the entire network and the ability to apply cybersecurity policies and efforts to the entire infrastructure.