Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) and Thales ( Paris : CGEP.PA) successfully completed interoperability between the Alcatel-Lucent 1850 Transport Service Switch (TSS) and Thales's Datacryptors. This interoperability test addressed large enterprise and government demands for highly secure networks to protect mission-critical data for sensitive information and public safety applications. Alcatel-Lucent and Thales take a new step in protecting mission-critical data distributed over optical fiber networks. The joint achievement further reinforces the cooperation between Alcatel-Lucent and Thales in strategic domains such as network security.
Global security concerns, coupled with new regulations in the Asia , Europe and the U.S. , are changing the security requirements in the wide area network (WAN) environment. As packet traffic increases, large enterprises and governments need to handle a wider variety of traffic streams. The interoperability test demonstrated that SONET/SDH networks operating up to 10Gbit/s, as well as 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks can be secured without impacting the traffic. This allows for voice, video and data services to be securely transported with negligible latency. Thales's synchronous optical network/synchronous digital hierarchy (SONET/SDH) and Gigabit Datacryptors successfully demonstrated encryption of an aggregate packet signal generated by the Alcatel-Lucent 1850 TSS.
Alcatel-Lucent has been deploying mission-critical WAN solutions for government, enterprises, and service provider networks for decades. The Alcatel-Lucent 1850 TSS enables service providers to migrate from time-division multiplexing (TDM) to packet-based transport with flexible provisioning of carrier Ethernet transport multi-protocol label switching (T-MPLS), SONET/SDH, wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and optical transport hierarchy (OTH) services in any proportion, with only a simple change of the line cards. This capability ensures that service providers can support current and future traffic requirements by eliminating scalability issues encountered by traditional multi-service provisioning platform/multi-service transport platform (MSPP/MSTP) solutions as packet-based traffic grows.
Governments and enterprises have deployed Thales's Datacryptor product line for many years in their new SONET/SDH and Gigabit Ethernet networks. Thales's Layer 2 encryption technologies provide superior throughput and lower latency than IPSec-based Layer 3 solutions. Layer 3 (IPSec) adds additional overhead that can create performance issues for high bandwidth applications. Governments and enterprises that need to secure a point-to-point link for connectivity or disaster recovery applications are achieving better performance by shifting from traditional IPSec to Layer 2 encryption solutions by Thales.
Alcatel-Lucent and Thales had already demonstrated the ability to secure a specific Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) stream. This new achievement further strengthens the cooperation between Alcatel-Lucent and Thales to deliver safeguarded optical networks that offer high-performance, high-bandwidth capacity and resiliency to keep large enterprises and public institutions running around the clock.