IoT has the potential to empower businesses and create opportunities to develop new services and products that will offer increased convenience and satisfaction for end-users and customers. IoT is beneficial not only for the individual user but also for enterprises.
Enterprise mobility management is one of the examples of the impact of IoT devices. There are a number of implementations of IoT, however, despite the opportunities, there are also a number of risks involved. Any device that can be connected via the internet has an embedded operating system deployed in its firmware and vulnerabilities are present in virtually all of them. Similar threats will likely proliferate among IoT devices as they catch on.
Enterprises must be aware of these issues and must also be prepared for the risks:
- In order to avoid potential operational failure, the continuous availability of IoT based devices is important. Even simple processes of adding new endpoints into the network need businesses to focus on physical attacks on the devices in remote locations could be a potential risk.
- Disruptive cyberattacks, such as distributed denial-of-service attacks, could have new detrimental consequences for an enterprise. This is because of the downtime that these attacks create. Thousands of IoT devices try to access a corporate website or data feed. If that data isn’t available; it directly impacts even the happiest customers will turn into dissatisfied customers, resulting in revenue loss, customer dissatisfaction and potentially poor reception in the market.
- Stolen and lost devices to pose a great risk. Either remote wiping of data or disabling their connectivity is critical in case the devices are compromised.
- It’s also important to understand where the vulnerabilities fall on the complexity meter. If we cannot gauge how serious a threat they pose, it will be a great risk to the enterprise.
- In the IT world, layered security and redundancy management are critical elements. The challenge for enterprises lies in identifying where the security controls are needed for this emerging breed of IoT devices.
- Given the diversity that will exist among these devices, organizations need to conduct customized risk assessments, to identify what the risks are and how best to contain them.
- The variety of new Wi-Fi-enabled devices connecting to the Internet will create a flood of data for enterprises to collect aggregate, process and analyze. While certainly, organizations will identify new business opportunities based on this data, new risks emerge as well.
- Organizations must also be able to identify legitimate and malicious traffic patterns on IoT devices. To combat this challenge, enterprises must build the right set of tools and processes required to provide adequate security analytics.
- Enterprises need to proactively set the stage by isolating the IoT devices to their own network segment or vLAN. Technologies such as microkernels or hypervisors can be used with embedded systems to isolate the systems in the event of a security breach.
- Network traffic and hence bandwidth usage jumped 700% on networks the vendor observed, largely due to streaming media, peer-to-peer applications and social networking. As more devices connect to the Internet, this number will continue to grow.
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Conclusion
The Internet of Things has great potential for the consumer as well as for enterprises, but not without risk. The increased complexity within the enterprise shouldn’t be overlooked, and organizations must ensure basic security principals of confidentiality, integrity, and availability are maintained in what will be an increasingly interconnected digital world.
