It’s not just about compute and storage for enterprises anymore. The lightning pace of innovation today demands agility, pushing large swathes of enterprise operations to the edge, where edge computing plays a crucial role in enabling real-time processing and decision-making.

Given the mounting threats to valuable enterprise data, how can companies secure their networking infrastructures while remaining agile and leveraging edge computing’s benefits?

“If you look at the customers we serve, 5G is often acting as the primary WAN connection,” said Camille Campbell (pictured), director of product marketing for wireless WAN and security at Cradlepoint Inc. “Once you’re leveraging cellular as a primary WAN connection, in the same way you’re always securing your wired broadband connections, you also have to put security over the cellular network. [Secure Access Service Edge] is an agile way to do that — you’re consuming the services you need through the cloud and overlaying it on top of your connectivity.”

Campbell spoke with theCUBE Research analyst Shelly Kramer during a SecurityANGLE analyst insight series from theCUBE. They discussed Cradlepoint’s approach to balancing the intricacies between connectivity and security in 5G environments.

Leveraging edge computing: Enhancing 5G networking in dynamic enterprise scenarios

As a leading provider of enterprise 5G networking solutions, Cradlepoint’s specialty is wireless or cellular WAN connectivity for diverse corporate use cases. From equipping police cars with capable technology to facilitating internet of things deployments, it ensures reliable connectivity, even in the most challenging scenarios, according to Campbell.

“Many of the use cases are simply to support areas where wired WANs just simply won’t work,” she said. “An example of that is vehicles. Vehicles today are equipped with more and more sophisticated technology. If you look at a police car, for example, you’ve got body cams, have dash cams and license plate readers — a lot of sophisticated technology, and that technology needs connectivity.”

There’s a growing market demand for streamlined, simplified security measures to serve dynamic enterprise environments. Organizations seek unified policies to manage cellular and IoT connections across hybrid environments — that’s where SASE solutions come in. SASE combines edge networking and security functions into a single point of service.

While NetCloud isn’t the only SASE solution out there, Cradlepoint is differentiating itself by focusing on cellular connectivity and tailoring solutions to the unique characteristics of cellular networks, Campbell explained. By providing agile and secure connectivity through the cloud, it meets the evolving needs of modern enterprises.

“We’re not trying to be another vendor attacking the SASE market,” Campbell told Kramer. “We’re trying to carve out a niche for ourselves to make sure that if a customer is consuming cellular for their wide area network, we have a solution that’s tailored for the unique characteristics of cellular, so that our SASE solution can work efficiently and cost-effectively over cellular WANs, which really behave a lot differently than traditional wired WAN.”

Cradlepoint’s second differentiation areas are simplicity and portability. Primarily targeting smaller IT teams, it has positioned its offering to be streamlined, unified and hassle-free, according to Campbell.

“If you look at our customer base and who we serve, we’re serving that mid-market, lean IT customer and they demand simplicity,” she said. “One of the things that we have as an advantage is we haven’t come from a place where we have many disjointed products that we have to integrate into one consolidated platform.”

Unpacking the nuances of securing 5G at the edge

Network security, particularly in today’s edge computing and 5G era, is more nuanced than it’s ever been. High-speed mobile networks are ubiquitous, and several critical and essential activities depend on them — from finance to medicine, manufacturing, entertainment and commerce. Beyond the backup operations of the past, securing modern cellular networks demands tight optimizations to safeguard against failures and downtime scenarios, Campbell pointed out.

“When that 5G connection is your primary WAN source, it simply can’t go down, it is the lifeline — you need to probably think about some advanced networking,” she said. “The other dynamic about cellular is that bandwidth can fluctuate. Considering those types of things as well when making traffic steering decisions becomes very important. Also, from a security perspective, we have to be very mindful of things like tunneling and encryption in a cellular world because, for the most part, our customers still have data plans.”

The transition from non-standalone to standalone 5G networks presents exciting opportunities for enterprises. With the advent of standalone 5G, new functionalities such as 5G network slicing become accessible. Cradlepoint anticipates these transitions and is positioning itself to deliver reliable wireless connectivity and innovative solutions, Campbell added.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video with Camille Campbell:

Image: MF3d/Getty Images