Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:04):
So we're at future Networld in London. I'm here with Nektaria Efthymiou, who i Network Platform and Security Research Director at BT Group. Nektaria, thank you very much for joining us today. Great to see you. So what is BT focusing on with its research into network automation right now?

Nektaria Efthymiou, BT (00:26):
So I can tell you what we are looking BT research, obviously there's a lot of developments across the business, different domains progressing this, but in research what we are looking for automation, there are three main areas. One is intent because they knew as part of the network automation framework, the intent and how you declare the intent is quite important. But also how do you translate the intent from the customer level to business level service network layer. So how do you take the intent all the way through the network, how do you translate it to what needs to be delivered? And then how the intelligence in the network knowledge base combination of AI and takes this intent and convert as to how it has to be delivered by making sure always the intent is in the line of sight throughout the life of the service, from the onboarding to provisioning and the assurance.

(01:35):
So intent and how intelligent is managed in the network are the main two areas. But for us, the other area which we are looking is how you can orchestrate intent and intelligence within the network. Because if you remember level four automation is about having automation across different domains, closed loop but also cross domains and the network is very complex. So we need to understand how do we orchestrate knowledge and intent across not only the layers business service network but also across all the different domains of the network. And Zen AI is possibly a way of looking at this, but of course there are other ways that we are looking in research how to address some of these questions.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (02:27):
So I mean cybersecurity has, I guess never been as front and center as it is now for the telecom community. What can telcos like BT be doing to protect themselves and their customers even better than they already are?

Nektaria Efthymiou, BT (02:44):
I can tell you what we are looking in BT research a little bit to put that also in the context is the cyber crime. By 2029 it's estimated to be approximately around $15 trillion. That's quite a lot. And of course this is driven a lot by ai, right? So we have seen that phishing AI with phishing emails is doing very well. They can produce very well formulated dramatically correct emails. Also deep fakes that we expect that this is going to grow. We already have seen some cases with DeepFakes and impersonated CFO. It was the recent example where impersonated A CFO

(03:45):
With a 25 million wire transfer. But also what we see that AI is used to speed up the malware development because of the way that it can help in the code generation. It can actually be used also for malware development speed up the malware development. And also we have seen that AI is prompting injections, which means that in a way somebody can use that bypass the traditional security policy. So there's one trend is on ai. The other thing also that is happening in our industry is our networks. We are modernizing our networks. We are moving to more cloud-based disaggregated networks and because we have a lot of devices actually we keep adding more and more connected devices to the network. The attack surface is increasing, the vulnerabilities are more the vulnerability points and the traditional pyramid perimeter security is not working anymore as it used to.

(04:55):
So we need to start thinking how we can create innovations in my team in security, we're looking how we can build innovations that they can protect the network but also they can be at the platform level where we can move if you like, from the traditional security tools that had a lot of technology that where you have to build and integrate and up they upgrade everything else. They come to become more platform based API based to be able to not only use them for us but also use them, offer them to our customers. So in my team in research that three areas if like we're looking the first is zero trust and how we can build the immunity in the system the same way as the biological immunity.

(05:54):
So the same way our body recognize the virus and try to defend before we start taking over the top the pills the same way we're trying to understand how we can create that. And the zero trust is not a new per se strategy security strategy, but it is actually now more important because of all the risks I mentioned, the trends we see on ai. So there is more about try to understand how we can do better identity management, how we can create agile authentication, but also how we can understand better the risk in context. So what I mean today we can get the risk profile of a device in the network, but what if we were able to understand what is the network health as we call it in my team of an area of the network which is a combination of different nodes by understanding how an attack will happen, simulating how it'll propagate in the network, and then identify what is the risks and what things we need to do.

(07:04):
So this is one area we are looking. The other area that actually AI is helping a lot is threat management. Traditionally threat management is done by observing the network flows, the behaviors, what is happening and then you detect something is wrong. But actually with AI there is an opportunity, especially with authentic AI to move more from manual to automated and even start using azen AI to if you like, not only detect if there is a problem but also allocate tasks and try to solve that. And the third area we are looking is how we can move from the traditional perimeter security to more platform based API based security that can platforms that they can be implemented as microservices, they can be available not only to us but also to the customers and also these type of platforms that will allow us to even on threat management, threat detection, they can allow a bit more of a federated model to understand what is happening as well and be able to respond on that. So in summary, these are the main three areas in BT research we're looking.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (08:33):
You mentioned there a couple of times the use of APIs in developing this new approach to cybersecurity. I know it is a really big topic now network APIs, but is there a way to sum up what BTS strategy around network APIs is and how that is evolving

Nektaria Efthymiou, BT (08:54):
APIs is, if we step back a little bit, right for me what APIs they do, they change the relationship of the application with the network. So traditionally the applications that are over the top run on the networks and then the networks, we try to meet as much as we can. What is the application requirements? Now what the API does, it allows the network to expose the capability that they can be used then by a customer or developer to drive a use case. API is the enabler. So what you need on top of the APIs, you need the right ecosystem and collaboration across industry sectors governments to have the right investment in place in order to drive demand and adoption. And yes, we are looking APIs across different contexts. I imagine it in security, but also in how we can expose CAMARA APIs. BT has actually launched the API program since 2017. So there's a lot of things going on there. There were some significant milestones as well along the journey. There are about, I think it's 1 billion digital ID transactions and we are partnering with 25 aggregators

(10:34):
And we have over 200 million payment transactions annually. So there's quite a lot of work already has been done there. And now the next step is really how we can expose the CAMARA APIs to a broader ecosystem in order to drive this adoption.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (10:50):
Obviously that is gaining momentum. The more operators are involved, the more developers are, and I guess it has then its own, it grows from strength to strength. So we're seeing that pretty quickly I think. And then right at the beginning you mentioned that sustainability is also part of your focus and quite a few people have observed that with the rise of AI and AI being at the front and center of a lot of conversations these days that the sustainability has maybe dropped to the background a little bit, it's not talked about as much, but is this still as important to BT as it ever was or even more important?

Nektaria Efthymiou, BT (11:29):
So yes it is. We have our sustainability manifesto where we have already declared our targets in terms of net zero targets. And in BT research we are working with our colleagues with different line of business to look primarily three things is the first is energy optimization. And this is actually directly affect the bottom line of any operator, right? Because this is optimizing your energy consumption, you reduce your costs. So one is energy optimization and consumption and how we can use AI to dynamically manage the energy. So in BT we have launched the cell sleep on the 4G network where we effectively put the cell to sleep when there's no traffic. But we are looking how we can make this more dynamic and also how we can extend this to the other technologies. Other things we look there is carbon emissions and this is quite important and we are working again, how we can measure this and how we can report back to meet our, but also we are looking the life cycle assessment of the surveys and the product that is also important for longer term targets. And of course sustainability is always something where for the last 10 years as an industry we have evolved a lot and there's a lot of discussion and maturity around the targets and what we need to do that. So yes.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (13:22):
Okay. While it might be talked about less in the telecom industry, it's talked about more and more by customers I feel. So that hasn't gone away. So the demand side for that kind of information and progress I think is still there. So that helps to keep things moving I guess as well. Nectar, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us today. Pleasure to meet you. Thank you.

Nektaria Efthymiou, BT (13:48):
Thank you.