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PREDICTIVE
INTELLIGENCE
Middle East telecom
giant scales out security for
massive
5G-rollout with A10 Networks
Thunder CFW
When a Middle East telecom giant needed atscale
protection to safeguard its 4G and 5G mobile
networks, it turned to A10 Networks. The telecom leader
wanted a high-performance, scalable and agile solution
for its Gi-LAN firewall that would deliver high throughput to
support tens of millions of subscribers.
Introduction
This premier service provider in the
Middle East offers a broad variety of
ICT solutions and digital services to
consumers and businesses. Thirty
million people rely on its mobile, fixed
and Wi-Fi services to stay connected
to the world, and the company also
offers a broad range of IT, cloud and
cybersecurity solutions to businesses.
Challenge
With digital connections an essential
part of people’s personal and work
lives, 4G traffic on the provider’s
mobile network was rising sharply.
An innovator, the telecom company
launched 5G in 2019 and plans to build
the largest 5G network in the Middle
East. The telecom giant needed at-scale
protection to safeguard its 4G and 5G
mobile networks.
The company had long relied on
another vendor to provide firewall
and carrier-grade network address
translation (CGNAT) services for the
GiLAN segment of its mobile network.
But as traffic volumes steadily climbed,
the performance of the firewalls
began to lag.
Limited throughput and degrading
connections per-second performance
could expose the network to attacks or
an unsatisfying subscriber experience.
But staying the course meant purchasing
entirely new firewalls from the vendor.
That required a large upfront capital
investment, and bigger hardware also
would consume more valuable space,
power and cooling, adding to OPEX.
The telecom leader wanted a highperformance,
scalable and agile solution
for its Gi-LAN firewall that would deliver
high throughput to support tens of
millions of subscribers.
Selection criteria
Like many service providers, this
company deployed different Gi-LAN
service functions on independent devices.
But ultimately, this architecture makes the
Gi-LAN more complex and inflexible.
Instead of a traditional monolithic
architecture, the provider investigated
the value of a scaleout architecture with
NFV. NFV provides many advantages in
the virtualisation of network functions
and the ability to develop infrastructures
that are more flexible and scalable with a
lower TCO.
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