As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to grow and further embeds itself within every aspect of our lives on both personal and business levels, have we done enough to prepare ourselves for the numerous risks that come with it?
From an enterprise perspective, the opportunities IoT offers to boost efficiency through the automation of numerous processes and gain deeper insight into the customer by analysing the vast ocean of rich data that can be pulled from the plethora of new smart devices are seemingly endless.
In fact, with a recent Gartner report having claimed that there will be around 20billion (almost three times the world population) active IoT devices in use by 2020, it’s clear that the Internet of Things will revolutionise and redefine the world we live in just as the smartphone did before it.
However, Gartner also reported that as much as 25% of identified attacks will involve IoT by 2020, we can also see that these opportunities don’t come without risk and the criminals looking to exploit, steal, annoy and destroy, stand much to gain from it, too.
From a consumer perspective, IoT puts more of their personal information onto the web than ever before; from a business perspective, IoT potentially creates a countless number of new entry points for hackers to access the network and cause all sorts of unprecedented problems.
At present, many businesses find it difficult enough to maintain the security of their own network, and with IoT being added on top they are more than likely going to find it extremely difficult to keep afloat unless their approach is changed.
This fear is also reflected in another Gartner report that predicts the IoT security market will grow from $231.86million in 2014 to $547.20 in 2018 and is expected to continue growing at a considerably faster rate after 2020 as improved skills, organisational change and more scalable service options improve execution.
More likely than not, the future will look towards the cloud for a solution and is highly likely that we’ll be seeing IaaS developers moving into this space to help organisations deal with the millions of new devices that will be used to access their network in the future.
However, though this is likely to be the case in the future, IoT security is very much a new territory and the development of mature, reliable network protection is very much in its infant stages. With this in mind, we can undoubtedly expect to see more news of IoT related incidents popping up over the next few years until the gap between IoT innovation and IoT security closes.
