How 5G can contribute to greater national security

5G mobile edge computing is poised to help federal agencies operate more efficiently and securely. The technology can do so by wirelessly connecting a wider range of devices and applications operating over federal networks.

In a recent FedScoop panel, NSA’s Technical Director Neal Ziring discusses why and how 5G is going to help agencies better protect national security.

“Just the latency and performance characteristics of 5G are going to allow the military services defense agencies, like NSA, to deploy new applications, using mobile edge compute and multi-axis edge compute,” he explains. “We’ll be able to put data out forward closer to the users that need it and offer them services with a much shorter turnaround time.”

Ziring also highlights the role of 5G in security and says: “The other aspect of 5G that’s going to be very important for [the Department of Defense] is the improved security and authentication and network management that it’s going to offer—the ability to distinguish different types of devices, give them access to different services, whether it’s mobile edge compute or via network slices.” He explains how that will allow agencies to offer more flexible, real-time services and in turn, open new application areas.

Joining the panel discussion, Wes Withrow, Verizon’s public sector solutions executive, elaborates on 5G bringing federal agencies a new generation of capabilities.

“It’s about reducing and eliminating a lot of the overhead required to address a lot of use cases that have just been previously off limits to them, whether it was cost, complexity or security,” he says. Withrow also explores the benefits of network slicing, which allows network operators to set up logical networks on top of a shared infrastructure.

“With 5G, you can do [network slicing] and have the flexibility to quickly change how that slice is controlled, because historically, for security and networking to be fused together and make changes to the network that took months, years, decades. But now we are having conversations about timeframes to where you can implement these different security capabilities in minutes, hours and weeks. So, it’s about security, but it’s about the speed to be able to adapt security.”

Learn more about how Verizon works with its DOD partners to better protect national defense.

This video panel discussion was produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop and underwritten by Verizon.