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Another disruptive trend, another set of headaches for IT.
The Internet of Things (IoT),
spurred by the arrival of inexpensive storage and
better chipsets for
connectivity, promises a
future where Internet smarts extend far beyond the familiar
realm of
smartphones and computers.
Another disruptive trend, another set of headaches for IT.
The Internet of Things (IoT), spurred by the arrival of inexpensive storage and better chipsets for
connectivity, promises a future where Internet smarts extend far beyond the familiar realm of
smartphones and computers.
Familiar devices and things never before associated with having Internet intelligence – items like
homes, railways, buildings, and bridges – are now able to monitor, communicate and respond when
their environment changes. And with more machines talking to each other through IoT connections,
companies have a trove of new information at their disposal to analyze.
The potential is huge: The McKinsey Global Institute predicts that IoT may add between $2.7 trillion
and $6.2 trillion to the world economy annually by 2025.
The success of this emerging IoT ecosystem will depend upon a robust cloud infrastructure managing
all these new sensors, devices, and data. As more companies seek to connect existing infrastructures
to IoT-enabled devices, they will turn to public and hybrid clouds to help manage and scale their
systems. The right cloud offering will let companies store and process the IoT data they collect and
attach rules and structure to that information for later consumption.
However, IoT’s speed of adoption also presents myriad new security and platform issues that IT will
need to navigate as more businesses make the transition to the cloud.
Indeed, the sheer scale of IoT is creating an “attack surface” of unprecedented size given the
proliferation of connected assets and devices – a change that presents new potential headaches for
IT because of the variety of platforms and protocols now involved.
Anything that is controlled by a computer can be maliciously controlled by somebody who has
compromised that computer, or, in many cases, is simply able to interact with it. And it doesn’t
take much of a pessimist to imagine at least some of the ways that things could go wrong, either
intentionally or deliberately.
Vulnerabilities have already been identified (and widely
publicized)
for a relevant, representative class of devices, such as smart TVs, IV infusion pumps, pacemakers,
and the electronics systems of automobiles, just to name a few. With a trillion devices, the network
becomes especially porous, so there is certainly plenty to worry about.
What’s more, the vast majority of devices that aren’t phones, laptops, or tablets don’t receive
updates automatically, and in many cases, it isn’t even possible for end-users to update device
firmware themselves.
As always, the challenge for IT is to figure out how to handle these security updates seamlessly. If
the past is prologue, these growing pains promise to be part of yet another transitional phase in
the disruptive history of technology.
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