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Everything everywhere seems to have a processor these days

The Internet of Things brings great functionality, but little security.
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Today's Internet connects people, governments, academia and business. The already emerging Internet of Things goes far beyond that. Largely enabled by embedded computing devices and ubiquitous communications, the Internet of Things reaches to vehicles, homes, towns and cities, commerce, manufacturing and every aspect of industry.

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 When it it time to research the great providers of Internet of Things Solutions, kick off  your search in the CTOvision Disruptive Technology Finder. Pay particular attention to our Internet of Things Companies section. For help putting all this information into context for your business, consider tapping into Crucial Point's CTO-as-a-Service or Technology Due Diligence offerings, both are ways to quickly leverage the technical talents of experienced enterprise technology professionals.

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One of the enjoyable things about estimating the future is there is always a new consideration. It is a dynamic task that is never done. This is especially true in analyzing the future of enterprise technology, where things are always moving fast. We try to find balance in tracking the future of technology by focusing on the metatrends, those very powerful forces that sweep over us all (whether we want them to or not). Megatrends change, but not as fast as the rapidly changing offerings of the tech ecosystem. This allows us to make predictions with a bit more certainty than trying to predict which product or solution or company will dominate. This approach enables a degree of certainty supportive of most strategic planning efforts, even if it does not provide precision around timing or exact manifestation of solutions.

Find our Reports on the Business of Technology at:

As you leverage our special reports keep in mind that we focus on the business impact of technology, and that very often leads us to discussion about the high tech firms bringing technology to enterprises. There are two other big concepts we want you to think about as you consider high tech firms, both come from the world of biology.

The two constructs from biology to think about regarding enterprise tech are: The Cambrian Explosion and a Malthusian Problem.

The Cambrian Explosion is was a period of rapid evolution and an explosion of life. The Cambrian Explosion began around 542 million years ago. Every living plant or animal today can trace its roots to the startups that began then.

A Malthusian Problem is when a population has outpaced the amount of resources required to support the population, resulting in catastrophe for most. The Malthusian Problem was articulated by Thomas Malthus in 1779 based on observation of famine, and, although Malthus never seems to have had an accurate prediction regarding human population growth and sustainment, he made a pretty clear case that if a population grows too large the result can be catastrophe.

In enterprise IT we have seen the Cambrian Explosion part of this equation, with 1,000’s of companies existing to address enterprise tech needs.

Will the Malthusian Problem part of this equation kick in? If it hits, which tech providers will thrive and which will perish? And what should the enterprise CTO do about it?

These are open questions of course. But if you ever have any context you can share on their answers or what we should do about it please let us all know!

As we track these topics we will continue providing our context here and in our tech directory. Be sure you are signed up to our daily and monthly reports for updates. Do that at: https://ctovision.com/newsletter-subscriptions/

 

Other Insights and Reporting for the Enterprise Technologist:

 

And for assistance in applying these trends to your business see:

NIST report on IoT security raises awareness on risks of connected devices

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a US physical sciences laboratory that promotes innovation and industrial competitiveness, has released a report to help organizations understand and manage cybersecurity and privacy risks associated with the internet of things (IoT). Mike Fagan, a NIST computer scientist and one of the authors of the report, said the paper is mainly for organizations thinking about security on the level of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. “It’s targeted at the mode of thinking that an organization would have — more resources, more people, more ability, but also more risk of attack because of all those things. It’s bad when a single house is attacked, but if a million bank account passwords are stolen, that has a much larger impact,” Fagan wrote in a company announcement.

Read about the new NIST Cybersecurity Framework which gives pointers to the Internet of Things security on Future IOT.

And for more CTOvision context see our Guide to IoT

A critical look at Gartner’s top 10 IoT trends

Read Fredric Paul analyze Gartner’s predictions for the Internet of Things connected devices on Network World :

At Gartner’s Symposium/ITExpo in Barcelona, Spain, earlier this month, the research firm shared a report on 10 strategic trends affecting the Internet of Things (IoT) from 2019 to 2023. In the report, titled Top Strategic IoT Trends and Technologies Through 2023, according to multiple published reports, the firm identified the following as the 10 most impactful IoT trends:

  1. Artificial intelligence (AI)
  2. Social, legal, and ethical IoT
  3. Infonomics and data broking
  4. The shift from intelligent edge to intelligent mesh
  5. IoT governance
  6. Sensor innovation
  7. Trusted hardware and operating systems
  8. New IoT user experiences
  9. Innovation on the chip
  10. New wireless networking technologies for IoT

Read his full article here.

Related Reporting:

 

 

Transforming the manufacturing industry with internet-of-things

Read Mike Russell explain how the Internet of Things is transforming the manufacturing industry on Dynamic Business :

In a highly competitive global marketplace, businesses are searching for and adopting revolutionary technology and processes to stay relevant. Today, many enterprises believe that The Internet of Things (IOT) is the key driver of digital initiatives, placing it third after cloud and mobile. With the advent of automation and analytics, manufacturing is moving from mass production to mass customization. The immense growth of IoT in the industry has resulted in factories being able to extract critical data on operations. By using big data and machine learning they are achieving more efficiency in their workplace as well as enhancing customer experience.

Read his full article here.

How IoT Has Been Changing The Face Of Business

Read Dr. Sarthak Bakshi explain how the Internet of Things are changing the way we do business on Business World :

Business in the 21st Century has been deviated from its streamlined path and is very dynamic and easily adaptable to the changes around. All the existing businessmen in today’s market really need to be vigorous, enterprising and flexible to the environmental changes. Businesses that do not subsist and survive with the advancing changes, get stagnant while also experiencing a fall in their success rates radically. The Internet of Things (IoT) is the next big and stimulating projections for contemporary enterprises, as it has the capability to transfigure and modernize everything. In simple words, Internet of Things is infusing brains into machines and pushing the business to develop unfathomable relations with its customers.

Read his full article here.

5 Questions Retailers Should Ask Before Using The Internet Of Things In Stores

Read Kass Dawson list five questions that every retailer who intends to use Internet of Things connected devices in their stores should be ready for on Ad Age :

McKinsey estimates that by 2025, the potential economic impact of the Internet of Things (IoT) in retail could be anywhere from $410 billion to $1.2 trillion annually. This means, if you’re a retailer considering IoT adoption, it’s not a question of “if,” but “when.” But introducing IoT to the store requires a lot of time and resources. So before you begin investing in automated checkouts, smart customer-relationship management, robotics, in-store personalized promotions and more, here are five questions you need to ask yourself to ensure your business is ready.

The questions include:

1. What is your end goal?:

  • IoT offers many potential benefits to retailers, but IoT for IoT sake won’t move margins, or drive customer loyalty.

2. How will your strategy improve the customer experience?:

  • Speaking of IoT goals, make sure your goals will help—and not hinder—the customer experience.

3. What will you do with the data?:

  • While IoT relies on devices, it’s still a data strategy. This means that to be effective it must be measurable, sharable, and actionable.

4. How will you capitalize on the network effect?:

  • McKinsey reports that up to 40 percent of the potential value of an IoT strategy lies in the interoperability of the systems. This means that, if you’re looking at each piece of technology as an individual device, you’re missing a huge opportunity to leverage the whole ecosystem of technology.

5. How will you maintain security?:

  • According to Forrester Research, 92% of global technology enterprise security decision makers have created security policies for their IoT devices, but only 47% can enforce them. With 60% of global consumers expressing concern about IoT security breaches, security is an important consideration of launching IoT-enabled systems and services.

Read the full article here.

The commercial impact of IoT insecurity

Introduction

A hacker recently shut down Bycyklen, Copenhagen’s public city bikes system, forcing employees to hunt down and manually reboot the Android tablet attached to every bike. The company said that restoring all bikes to working order would “take some time”. Naturally, the costs of restoration will be significant.

This is just one example of the tremendous financial cost that can result from malware being allowed to infect IoT devices.

Return on Security Investment calculation

Cybersecurity managers have long used the Return on Security Investment (ROSI) method to measure the cost-effectiveness of their security operations, justify their budget and provide supportive arguments for their next budget claim. Unlike other business investments, security does not fall under the classic return on investment calculation:

The reason for this is that security is not usually an investment that provides profit, but rather an investment designed to prevent loss.

As such it is usually calculated in the following manner:

This is a quite standard calculation that has been around for a while, but how does it apply to IoT?

To answer this, we need to estimate the cost of a single incident and multiply it by the probability of the incident occurring. The costs of an IT-related cyber incident have been debated in the past. Potential factors include downtime, the cost of stolen or lost records, theft of money and IP and more.  But what are the costs of an IoT-related attack?

To find out, a group of researchers from UC Berkeley examined the famous Mirai botnet attack in order to gauge its commercial impact on consumers.  They began by running a simulated attack on the same types of devices that were susceptible to Mirai, including cameras, DVRs and routers. They then measured the additional energy and bandwidth consumption, and multiplied it by the cost of power and bandwidth at different locations/times of day. Finally, they added the additional costs resulting from lost productivity and the need to repair or replace all of the faulty devices. (The actual cost per device varied according to the DDoS attack type and duration.). Their calculations showed that, on average, the attack cost each device owner $13.50.

Differentiating between a one-time attack and perpetual malware 

However interesting this may be, the calculation is somewhat irrelevant to real-world, commercial IoT deployments and corresponding risks. The UC Berkeley researchers examined the impact of IoT devices’ participation in a denial of service attack — a relatively short-term activity that lasts only a matter of hours. In contrast, most malware targeting IoT devices works continuously to infect other machines. As such, the devices consume additional power, CPU and bandwidth, and wear out much more quickly than a device that is just used for one, albeit exhausting, attack. Devices engaged in cryptocurrency mining also suffer from ongoing resource consumption and wear-and-tear.

Performance

Infected IoT devices constantly try to infect other devices or use their resources to mine crypto. The result is that they are less capable of performing the task they were designed for, be it capturing facial images, recording license plate numbers, or any other task that demands processing and computing power.

Availability

Naturally, devices that constantly communicate are less available, and sometimes bottlenecks and disconnections occur, leading to lower availability. Service providers are required to deliver a certain availability and could face fines if they fail to meet these criteria.

Repair costs

IoT devices that are in constant operation suffer greater wear and malfunction sooner. The cost of malfunction mostly comes from the cost of the human technician required to physically access the device.

Replacement cost

Some aggressive malware types intentionally “brick” devices and are even resilient to rebooting. If this happens, the device will need to be fixed in a lab or replaced altogether.

Additional costs

In addition to the direct costs listed above, there can be significant indirect costs associated with IoT infection. These include ransomware payments for the unlocking of critical IoT devices, and liability/legal costs resulting from a large-scale IoT deployment being utilized to attack another entity.

Summary

As we’ve seen, infected IoT devices can have a substantial commercial impact on IoT service providers. The larger the IoT deployment, the greater the risk and potential for financial loss. To mitigate the financial and operational risk, IoT service providers must deploy real-time detection and mitigation solutions that enable quick remediation of cyber threats before they can infect large portions of the IoT solution and result in massive monetary losses.

The IoT for unconnected things

It’s been the year-of-IOT for a few years now. Have we not arrived yet?

Unfortunately for most, IoT (Internet of Things) and particularly IIoT (Industrial I0T) remains a continuously advancing horizon. Fix-before-failure, predictive maintenance, smart metering, asset tracking, have all been touted as the killer-apps of IIoT for a long time.

To be fair, IoT is trending in the right direction, but is not fully there yet. Turns out that the reason is pretty simple. It’s been reported that roughly 2% of Cisco’s IoT devices “call home”. For industrial manufacturers, it’s the same story but exacerbated by the fact that they must rely on their un-connected installed base for any aftermarket growth. Equipments that were installed years and even decades ago are certainly not connected. So, how do you deploy fix-before-failure on un-connected assets?

Data science to the rescue

Where IoT can’t come to the rescue, data science could. The question that many manufacturers are asking every day is: how can we leverage customer data (things like orders, service records, call center logs, sales opportunities) across a variety of system (like CRM, warranties, service contracts, etc…) to extract patterns of customer behavior and usage to predict customer needs? But there’s more. How can these companies get better at predicting the health of drifted customers? How do they increase the linkage rate of customers so more assets are under contract? How do they ultimately improve the connect rate for our customers, so they can drive top-line revenue by recovering lost wallet share?

Data science can, and does, provide some answers. AI-driven platforms like Entytle Insyghts are helping B2B manufacturers harness the power of their historical and new customer data to increase installed base visibility, identify patterns and predict customer service and sales needs. Ultimately, it’s up to a company’s service, marketing and sales team to do something with these insights: which means that a certain degree of change management needs to happen too.

Manufacturers embracing this new approach are transforming their aftermarket approach from being reactive to proactive. They are improving their connectivity with customers are driving better outcomes for their customers. As Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia said, “Software may be eating the world, but AI is going to eat software.”

The promise of IIoT to B2B manufacturers

The promise of IIoT is massive: harnessing machine data, sensor, fault logs, operational information etc. to drive very specific and targeted insights, with the main goal of pre-empting failure events and ensuring high asset uptime. These ideas are not new; about 25 years ago, GE, Rolls Royce and other engine makers would routinely get performance data off an engine to understand failure, duty cycle etc. What was hard then is much easier now.

But there are still a couple of problems with the GE and Rolls Royce engine model. First, not everything in the field is a Rolls Royce engine. In fact, most installed equipment isn’t, and these assets also don’t have sensors on them. The result: a vast majority of the installed base of manufacturers is mostly unconnected and the timeline to connecting is way in the future. It gets worse: for the small minority of devices that are connected, getting actionable data from those them remains a long-term objective.

Finally, those manufacturers that are connected with sensors and have the ability to remotely extract data, are complacent just collecting gobs and gobs of it and promptly relegating that same data to a system where it’s rarely touched.

The IoT for unconnected things

Corporations are sitting atop vast amounts of information collected from daily interactions with customers. This ranges from order entry events, invoices, field service calls, tech support, CRM records and so on. These datasets have great value standalone, but they can provide great insights on customer and asset behavior when analyzed collectively. Data can now be used to predict failures, service events, sales opportunities etc. More importantly, it helps drive timely, targeted and proactive engagement with customers, which ultimately drives loyalty and lifetime revenue growth for the manufacturer.

This data already exists and can be reviewed and analyzed today, with deployment ‘tomorrow’. It’s the IoT for unconnected things.

How the Internet of Things is Influencing a New Cybersecurity Era

Cybersecurity is the new chief concern for every organization. Recent global attacks like Wannacry and NotPetya have proved that hackers aren’t sparing any institution in their latest show of might. Most companies have thus resulted in the internet of things, and it’s cybersecurity features to help keep their digital assets safe. But does IoT offer the much needed online security?

Analysts agree on the fact that the current technological advancements have rendered the IoTs online security features ineffective. Contrary to their intended functions, some of these interconnected devices have, in the recent past, been used by cybercriminals to access company data. For instance, hackers recently exploited a vulnerability on amazon’s echo to infiltrate company’s using the devices.

Note that while Amazon might have provided a patch for that, there is no telling what other vulnerabilities they will find in other IoT devices. There is, therefore, the need to address the influence IoT will have on the future of cybersecurity. These include:

 

Exposing weaknesses in traditional cybersecurity

If the latest cybersecurity threats are anything to go by, then it is clear that conventional online security mechanisms like antivirus and staff awareness can’t adequately protect your digital assets today. The massive uptake of IoT across all industries has helped unearth numerous security challenges affecting both the network systems and connected devices.

Manufacturers and developers can, therefore, learn from the current challenges facing their innovations and improve on them with future technologies. Online security experts are nonetheless worried about the manufacturers’ sluggish response to online security threats as they continue to introduce inadequately protected devices into the market.

Reduce human activity in cybersecurity

Human beings have, for long, been considered the soft underbellies and weak links when it comes to institutional cybersecurity. Despite the enormous resources company’s set aside for staff education on the importance of online security and different activities that put company assets under threat, human error still leads the pack of activities endangering a company’s cyber environment.

Champion the introduction of intelligent cybersecurity

In appreciation of the role human beings play in exposing digital assets to cyber threats, future IoT may turn its attention towards less human interactive systems. Online security companies have already come up with intelligent security systems that help mitigate against these threats. These include the network monitoring tools aimed at continually keeping tabs with a company’s or IoT systems online activities and reporting them in real time.

Advancements in technology and the fusion of artificial intelligence with IoT might see the introduction of more intelligent systems that not only report suspicious online activities but also takes appropriate actions like quarantining them. Technological giants have even come up with smart systems that help identify loopholes in an IoT system like helping identify private data appearing on public domains.

Revolutionize how people share information

How you store, process, and share data over the internet births any cyber threat facing your organization. Most institutions understand this fact and have, therefore, come up with several strategies on how to secure each part of the data sharing process by insulating the input, storage, processing, and sharing systems from cyber attacks by way of high-bit end-to-end encryption techniques.

Human involvement in any of these data sharing stage translates to reduced security features as humans can’t read encrypted files. This in effect exposes the entire system to vulnerabilities that hackers can use to terrorize your organization.

IoT seeks to revolutionize this process by eliminating human error in the data storage and sharing. Considering the fact that IoT is primarily machine to machine communication, IoT security experts can help come up with stronger protection controls that only the interconnected devices can decipher.

Bottom line

The internet of things is about to champion a revolution in cybersecurity that starts with eliminating cases of human error. These will be replaced by the more reliable intelligent systems and will affect the entirety of data processing, from capture through to sharing.

4 Lessons Businesses Can Learn From This Smart Lock Malfunction

The Internet of Things (IoT) is heavily built on the idea of connected households and associated gadgets. Many of the items we own interact with others, making our lives much more convenient. What happens when things go wrong, though?

LockState, a provider of smart locks, found that out the hard way in early August when a flawed firmware update caused a major error, affecting the smart code access mode within approximately 500 locks and making them useless. Let’s take a closer look at this reputation disaster and pinpoint four things other businesses in the same or similar sectors can learn about what happened, and how LockState could prepare in the future.

1. Customers Need to Have the Choice to Accept or Deny Such Updates

Problems stemmed from an over-the-air firmware update that affected the locks’ functionality and prevented the devices from connecting to the company’s servers. Many companies, including Apple, often announce the availability of new updates and let users decide when and if to download them for their gadgets. It’s even possible to schedule updates, so they don’t occur when people are trying to use the technology.

According to feedback from people affected by this smart lock debacle, they got the firmware update with no warning, similar to the way iTunes users suddenly found new U2 albums in their libraries without indicating they wanted the songs. In that case, Apple broke with tradition and delivered the media automatically, much to the dismay of some recipients who complained that the album ate up their internet data and that they didn’t like the band’s music.

2. Companies Should Be Realistic About Possible Failures

Although it goes against the tone of typical marketing materials, companies need to be straightforward about potential failures. They could try to spin a statistic in a positive way, such as by saying something like, “Our product has a 98.2 percent success rate.”

Indeed, most people know all devices can fail, but being reminded in a prominent way could encourage individuals to have backup plans, similar to how you would want to have a spare garage door opener in case you lose the original or someone steals it.

3. Providers Must Be Transparent and Responsive Across Social Media Channels

After people began discovering their smart locks were not behaving normally, they bombarded the LockState Twitter feed, accusing the company of not being upfront about the error. Individuals also got disgruntled because they thought LockState representatives took much too long to respond to the identified problems.

LockState’s situation and non-ideal ways of responding via social media are not unique. Many people are already hesitant to trust smart locks as being secure because of reported hacks. In the future, companies can be insistent about hiring dedicated teams of workers to monitor social media feeds. Then, if problems do happen, affected providers can spring into action right away. The quick response time helps restore trust even when products do not work as expected.

4. Brands Can’t Forget How Heavily People Rely on Their Products

LockState also came under fire during the fiasco because the company told customers it would take at least five days to fix the firmware update on an existing lock, or at least two weeks to get a replacement lock. Users were understandably outraged by the long lead times.

That’s especially true since many were Airbnb hosts, and they were using the faulty lock because of a partnership with the accommodation website. Because there is such a push for people to switch from traditional locks to so-called smart ones, many individuals may quickly become extremely dependent on this still-emerging technology, leaving them stranded during mishaps.

If LockState was intent on repairing things with irate customers, it should have offered to ship replacements to the affected users via an overnight option. Because the problem caused a lack of server connectivity, fixing the problem without physical intervention was impossible. The company also needs to look at ways to have a backup plan if connectivity breaks down again. Fixing the issue remotely or via fast shipping would have given peace of mind to reliant people.

LockState representatives are likely looking back on everything they wish they’d done differently in this case.

The positive side of that is how other companies can study the blunders — as we have here — and hopefully avoid them.

Image by Pixabay