NGMN seeks to bridge mobile network ‘air gap’ with new white paper

Today’s mobile networks are becoming more software-centric and cloud-based, with greater use of network functions virtualisation (NFV) and software defined networking (SDN). At the same time as they pave the way towards a more agile approach to service delivery and enabling greater network automation, mobile network operators’ teams are shifting from a traditional approach to a DevOps approach (which works to reduce the time it takes to deploy new software).

One barrier to this approach, as identified in a white paper from the Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) Alliance – Continuous Delivery in Telecommunication Network Environments – is the ‘air gap’: the strict separation between live networks (production environments), test environments and development environments, which is required for security reasons. The air gap makes it harder to move software from one environment to another.

The white paper sets out a concept that addresses this problem, allowing network boundaries to be bridged while meeting strict security requirements. It was designed with close collaboration between security experts and their counterparts in the fields of continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery automation. The concept takes advantage of cloud infrastructures and cloudified applications, but it is not limited to them and the authors claim that it also works well with classic data centres providing virtual machines or even physical network elements.