Transcript
new innovation that Zscaler has today, focusing specifically on Zscaler Cellular. Now Cellular in this case, I'm going to take you back and show you why and how things are working before, and then we'll jump in to the new in a minute. On both sides here I have diagrams, I'm going to show you basically on my right, how you are using your mobile phone today, on the left I'm going to show you how your IoT devices connect back into your corporate ecosystem. Very simply and very easily, when you have a SIM, and that SIM is provided to you by your telco or your operator, you're going to get an identity, and you're going to get some rules. Now those rules are pretty simple, they're going to be things like, you're allowed access to Spotify, or maybe you can go directly to the internet. Now what happens then is when your device connects in to the SIM, it connects into the mobile network, it passes through the mobile controls, applies the rules and your ID, and then sends you out via an egress firewall. The firewall is kind of like the delimitation point between the mobile network and the internet and other carriers for what it's worth, and that traffic will then pass through out to the internet and onto its merry way to your destination application, whatever that might be. Maybe it's an Apple website, maybe you're browsing YouTube, who knows. Now that's pretty simple and easy. Now this can also be utilised for IoT devices that may be going directly to these apps. Now these apps themselves are on the internet, therefore they have to have a listener, something to connect in to. So there's a risk, and that's where if it's an enterprise application, you have to put something kind of like a firewall or some sort of ingress control to protect it up here to wrap that app in security. Obviously that's a layout you have to think about from a protection point of view. Now if you want to connect your cellular connected devices to your own internal ecosystem, normally where you'd have a corporate data centre or a company ecosystem network, let me just write company here, what you're going to have is a series of applications, and those applications are corporate solutions that you may need access to. It could be cloud-based services that you're interconnecting here. It could be a cloud up here, maybe AWS or an Azure or something else. The whole idea is that when you want to connect your IoT device, your cellular connected devices to this, you have to extend your network to where the SIM is, and this is through what is called a private APN, or access point network. The APN itself is ultimately an extension so that when a SIM tries to connect here, it's still going to have that identity I mentioned before, as over with your own personal devices, and you're going to have rules. Those rules are going to be applied to the mobile network and say, oh, this is not going to connect to the internet. It's going to come up to that edge firewall, it's going to go through that APN tunnel and pop out into your company network. What that means then is this SIM is ultimately part, and the device running the SIM is part of your company ecosystem, and vice versa. Devices from here can actually also go back out and back down to the SIM. Now there's some advantages to this. Clearly you're able to pass information back and forward, you're able to access devices anywhere in the world, but then any of these devices can access your corporate infrastructure, and this plays into that whole flat network argument that is probably not the most modern and probably not the most secure, especially when thinking about it in terms of zero trust. Clearly the risks are if someone misuses this SIM, they could get access to your company infrastructure, and likewise someone could break into your infrastructure and make their way into those devices. Now these devices are cars, vehicles, infrastructure around the world that are outside the walls of your buildings and your company, therefore you need to be aware of them. What I'm going to show you next is how we solve this with Zscaler.
