Internet of Things

Sometimes, confirmation of the obvious can be really important. At least, that’s how I felt when I saw a new Bain & Company report, Cybersecurity Is the Key to Unlocking Demand in IoT. According to the consulting firm’s survey, 45 percent of Internet of Things (IoT) buyers say “concerns about security remain a significant barrier and are hindering the adoption of IoT devices.” Worries over IoT security are hardly news, of course. I’ve been writing about them here on Network World for a while, and a quick internet search for IoT security rains down more than a million hits.To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…

When it comes to security and manageability, Enterprise of Things (EoT) devices must have far more stringent requirements than consumer IoT devices, which often have virtually no built-in security. Indeed, enterprise use of consumer-grade IoT is highly risky.Making the matter even more urgent is the growing number of deployed EoT devices, which is expected to increase significantly over the next two to three years. (I estimate there will be more “things” in an enterprise than PC and mobile phone clients combined within three to four years.)To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…

Not so long ago, the phrase “consumerization of IT” was on everyone’s lips. Whole publications and conferences (remember CITE, for Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise?) were created to chronicle the trend of corporations relying on products and services originally created for consumers — which was often easier to use and of higher quality than its business-oriented competitors.Well, no one talks much about the consumerization of IT anymore… not because the trend went away, but because consumer tech has now permeated every aspect of business technology. Today, it’s just how things work — and if you ask me, that’s a good thing.To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…

Much work still must be done before the industrial and municipal Internet of Things (IoT) becomes widely adopted outside of the circle of innovators. One field, privacy, well understood by the public and private sector in the context of the cloud, PCs and mobile, is in the early stage of adaptation for the IoT.The sheer volume of data that will be collected and the new more granular architecture of the IoT present new privacy concerns that need to be resolved on an equal scale as the platform’s forecasted growth.A demonstration of this new aspect of privacy and compliance is the Privacy Guidelines for Internet of Things: Cheat Sheet, Technical Report (pdf) by Charith Perera, researcher at the Newcastle University in the U.K. The nine-page report details 30 points about implementing strong privacy protections. This report is summarized below.To read this article in full, please click here READ MORE HERE…