Ericsson, together with Ciena and Australian telecom provider Telstra, has successfully trialed continuous data encryption while maintaining speed and reliability over 21,940 km across multiple cable systems. The engineering teams demonstrated the ability to encrypt data securely while in transit between Los Angeles and Melbourne at 100Gbps, using Ciena’s ultra-low latency 100 Gigabit wire-speed encryption solution.
With the digitalization of business processes and data consumption rapidly rising, the need to keep data secure without compromising integrity or significantly increasing latency is essential at both the application and network layers.
Organizations with higher security obligations, such as those in the Finance, Healthcare, Defense, and Government sectors, as well as Data Center Operators, will be particularly interested in this new encryption technology. Testing this functionality is an essential step in the path towards commercialization so Telstra can be sure of service quality prior to deployment.
“This demonstration show that customer services with large bandwidth requirements can be secured and data transported across virtually any distance and over an underlying network that uses multiple vendors,” said Darrin Webb, Executive Director of International Operations and Services at Telstra.
“This means we can provide service consistency regardless of the cable system used. Customers will also be able to protect their data not only at the application layer, but also at the network layer without any reduction in quality,” added Webb.
Emilio Romeo, Head of Ericsson Australia and New Zealand, said: “A series of advanced demonstrations such as these are necessary before any product is released commercially. In partnership with Telstra and Ciena, Ericsson provides end-to-end systems integration expertise to deliver the secure solution, with our teams continuing to hit faster encryption milestones.”
In January 2015, Ericsson had success at 200Gbps between Melbourne and Sydney, then with 10Gbps speeds over the greater distance from Melbourne to Los Angeles in January this year. Ericsson has now achieved 100Gbps. “Ericsson will continue to support Telstra’s path toward commercialization of this enhanced security capability,” said Webb.
While encryption solutions exist today to protect data when it is ‘at rest’ (at the start and end points), this trial demonstrates the advanced security that can be delivered while data is ‘in transit’, that is, being transmitted beyond the walls of a data center across extensive networks, without any impact to performance.
