Fortinet Finds 5G Revenue Opportunities in Telecom Sector
Fortinet shared, TelecomTV in association with HardenStance and ETSI have conducted a commissioned survey and found broad-based optimism for 5G revenue opportunities among Telecom sector respondents.
Rajesh Maurya, Regional Vice President, India & SAARC at Fortinet: “From an infrastructure perspective, the migration of today’s mobile networks to 5G – especially standalone (SA) implementations – creates new security imperatives that extend well beyond inherent 5G capabilities as defined by 3GPP. The virtualized, distributed and dynamic nature of the 5G core combined with massive increases in scalability, the growing utilization of Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), and overall critical use cases, requires strong security for the underlying infrastructure and the business use cases. This is where Fortinet’s proven success at delivering 4G and 5G carrier-grade user and control planes visibility and protection, scalability and price-performance demonstrates a clear advantage to those looking to capitalize on these new 5G opportunities.”
A Prominent Business Opportunity
Overall, almost 90% of respondents anticipate growth in Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) from their investments. This growth is expected to be split evenly between public and private 5G networks, but since at least half of all private networks are likely to be built and managed by the operators, such companies could potentially capture as much as 75% of the overall5G business.
Critical to achieving these gains, however, according to 64% of respondents, will be the augmentation of existing security – as much in terms of architecture as in operations –as well as the tailoring of solutions to specific business use cases which are either critical or very important for nearly three-quarters of respondents – especially within the key vertical markets of transport, logistics, automation, manufacturing and healthcare.
These findings map well to the existing division of responsibility between cloud providers and their enterprise customers, where the maintenance and security of the infrastructure fall to the provider, while the enterprise is left to secure its data and applications.
The Importance of a Strong Security Value Proposition
Fortunately, cybersecurity is a top of mind consideration. More than80% of survey respondents consider that the inherent security features of the 5G3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)’s specifications as nothing more than a baseline for the 5G market. And 62% of all respondents asserted that some, or most, 5G use cases will require additional security features.
Also, providing a value proposition that extends beyond connectivity – as 61% of respondents consider unlikely business growth in ARPU if they confine themselves mainly or entirely to the connectivity layer of the 5G value chain – and adequately addresses the increased security requirements of 5G and the use cases it will deliver, was regarded as either critical or very important by almost 90% of respondents.
