Security-as-a-Service for Critical Communications: Cloud-Remastered

If you care about trust, this article is for you.

Start by looking at your phone. Yes! Pick it up and look at the SMS app. Have a look at how many messages there are from brands, businesses and services. If it’s your business to get those messages delivered to users, you care about trust: establishing a relationship, a trust-worthy communications channel between a business and its customers.

If your business gets messages delivered to users, you care about trust.

You attract through trust, performance and capability. Ensuring the highest levels of security creates hat needs the best security platform, one that doesn’t limit performance, nor hinders capability.

Not all of your customers share the same objectives, unfortunately. So how to identify the bad actors that damage the experience for the majority ? Acquisition of customers is a hard-fought battle, especially in high-growth phases or at just about any time in competitive environments. Acquiring bad customers can rapidly damage the trust you’ve worked hard to build, and destroy hard-earned growth.

Trust is lost when your infrastructure is a source of what carriers or customers would consider to be unwanted or malicious content. Inappropriate sending of regulated content (adult material, firearms-related content, alcohol references, and so on), SPAM messages, phishing content, and unsolicited media: these are risky content categories, delivery of which could lead to loss of trust or reputation by carrier partners, end-users, and your other customers.

The recipients are likely to complain and eventually take action, like preventing delivery, escalating to executives, blocking messages, or even blocking all your traffic. Obviously this has a financial impact if you are paid for delivery, and your customers will change provider if adversely impacted.

A primary way to prevent these scenarios is to secure your infrastructure with an actively-maintained SMS firewall. Firewalling can also protect MMS, RCS and voice service.
But once trust is lost, poor reputation is more expensive to address than building a good reputation from the get-go. It’s imperative, therefore, from the outset not to surrender a long-term reputation to security weakness.

The reality is that like organisations around the world, attackers are running a business. Bad actors learn from operating in the ruins of their weakest victims, honing their techniques to deploy against the defences of the strongest. And one exposed weak point can be quickly exploited by hundreds of shady organisations & individuals.

On a global scale, the gains are there to be made, but a global reach brings the challenge of global protection. How to protect someone in Birmingham, Brazil, Botswana, Belgium and Bali? To do so, you have to meet the demands of the carriers operating in multiple regions. The environments themselves are ever-changing, with new requirements and operating practices that have to be met, to avoid having your connectivity cut.

Your customers depend on reach, but if you lose trust, it quickly affects all regions’ operations. By limiting your security scope and strength, you hinder your capabilities worldwide. But security is difficult to maintain in a complex infrastructure of what’s effectively a closed ecosystem.

Remastered for the cloud

The answers to strong, agile and scalable security can be found by looking further down the value chain. Leading CPaaS providers offer agile, secure services, ones which provide the desired responsiveness & control on-demand via APIs, but never need to expose critical components of their business.

Security for your business, therefore, should come from a solution in the same model: one that scales and grows with your business and its demands, while bringing the best in security to nurture and grow the trust in your company . Once trust is taken care of, performance and capability shouldn’t be limited.

There is a global security platform that uses cloud-native design and processes supported by AWS cloud, to protect communication service providers; a smart infrastructure that’s continuously developed and updated, protecting the full breadth of the A2P sector to maintain security. The cyber intelligence services embedded in the AdaptiveMobile Security cloud remain alert and up-to-date on the user’s behalf, and on-boarding to the service can be completed in days, not months.

That combines the scalability and speed-of-deployment of cloud-native operations with a service that’s configured according to specific requirements of each customer. Cloud-native methodologies bring with them cutting-edge of technologies like microservices, elasticity, failover & reliability, and global scale.

The traditional, ponderous approach to the procurement of in-network solutions does not meet the demands of many of today’s businesses (like the CPaaS providers we mentioned earlier), nor does it align with the rest of the technology stack of any other vertical. The Dublin-based multinational’s cloud security platform has the fastest time-to-live service of any security system in the sector; its SECaaS (security as a service) offering is a world-first.

The protective network that ensures trust, in real-time

The company operates its own network of experts and security intelligence professionals, reinforced by machine learning-aided policy decisions. This provides constant monitoring of and updates to the services as threats evolve and mutate. Suspicious activity is assessed 24/7 across continents, so critical infrastructure remains as safe as possible, globally. As new threats appear as localized issues, the network upgrades to protect everywhere.

The unique blend of experience, global networks, and an elastic cloud provision means that communications providers can test and quickly deploy AdaptiveMobile Security’s services to add the type of security capability that’s critical in protecting the infrastructure that powers the world as we know it today.

To conclude: look again at your phone’s SMS messages. If you see major brands there, the chances are good that AdaptiveMobile Security has already protected you as the end-user, and protected the household-name brand as well. If you want to hear how AdaptiveMobile Security has helped brands’ providers, talk to the company about establishing trust in your service.

In the next article in this series, we’ll be looking at specific use-cases of cloud-based mobile network security, exploring some companies and the people behind them who have decided to move away from legacy security deployment cycles. By adopting service provision models that reflect those of the customers they serve, today’s forward-thinking mobile networks are going to AdaptiveMobile Security.

Check back in a few weeks to read those accounts or see here for more information from the company itself.