Cyber Security

If you know what a floppy disk is, you probably started the Internet journey like me, back in the 1990s. Back then, if you were an advanced digital native, you would have probably owned a Palm PDA as well.

Then as we entered the 21st century, laptops gradually became more affordable, and in 2007, Apple introduced its iPhone to the world, bringing smartphones to the masses. Connectivity on the go became more prevalent and the rise of mobile devices was unprecedented. By September 2006, mobile penetration exceeded 100% of the Singapore population for the first time.

Fast forward to the digital era today. The world is increasingly connected. Anything from television, fridge to watches seems to be connected to the Internet. Gartner forecasts that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide this year, and this number is projected to grow to 20.8 billion by 2020. This year alone, 5.5 million new things will get connected every day.

While the ultimate goal of Internet of Everything (IoE) is to improve our daily lives and business productivity, it also represents increased opportunities for hackers to formulate new cyber attacks. Cyber defence at the enterprise or endpoint level is no longer sufficient with the proliferation of internet connected devices.

Detecting the "unknown unknown" via a telco-centric approach

As a telco, we see large volume of Internet traffic going through us. Correlate that to the IoE and we have something in common — the Internet. Since all endpoint devices that are connected to the Internet need to go through a fixed broadband line or a mobile network, by integrating our cyber security capabilities into our telco core infrastructure, we can detect threats at our end, without the need for extensive integration efforts on the customers' part. Our customers can enjoy cyber security protection in a convenient and non-intrusive manner.

Having large volume of Internet traffic going through our network also means that we can have more cyber threat data for machine learning and analytics, better correlation of cyber threats across different sectors, resulting in extensive threat intelligence for better protection and early warning for all our customers.

Cyber Security is an important fundamental enabler of business productivity due to IoE and it’s time to put it at the core of your business enabler function.

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