Field service management provider ServiceMax has created an IIoT-driven platform called Connected Field Services to help companies implement predictive maintenance for their mobile and offsite equipment. Eventually, ServiceMax hopes the platform will help guarantee 100% uptime availability for mission-critical equipment.5
Get Ready for Smart Dust
Wireless devices the size of a grain of salt that are equipped with tiny sensors and cameras? Already a reality. Microelectromechanical systems (MEMs, or motes, as they’re sometimes called) are very real and have the potential to multiply the IoT millions or billions of times over.6 In the future, MEMs may be used in settings like agriculture, manufacturing, and security, as well as in robotics (Trend 13) and drone technology (Trend 19).
Key Challenges
Privacy is one concern with IoT devices – how much of our activity and behavior do we really want monitored, especially in our own homes? Many people appear happy to forgo their privacy in return for a smarter, more efficient home, yet advances like smart dust – where devices are so small they’re hard to detect – may make this a bigger concern going forward. For this reason, companies looking to embed IoT technology in their products, workplaces, and equipment should absolutely take privacy, ethics, and transparency seriously.
Security is another major concern. For one thing, the connectivity of IoT devices has created a dangerous side effect known as botnets. The term refers to a group of internet-connected devices controlled by a central system, and is usually related to DDoS attacks – where a hacker uses a large group of devices to flood a website with fake requests, bringing the website down. A famous example of this is the 2016 DDoS attack that took a major internet provider partially offline, causing many high-profile websites like Twitter and Amazon to disappear from the internet for a while. In that attack, an estimated 100,000 unsecured IoT devices were harnessed to create the botnet.7
The problem is many of these devices that connect to the internet have little or no built-in security – and even when they do, users often neglect to take basic security precautions, like setting a password. This makes the problem of botnets much worse – and also opens up devices to data theft. In other words, your smart devices could potentially leak your data, and offer easy access points to anyone looking to steal it.
Particularly for organizations – but really, for anyone with an IoT device – it’s vital to take the necessary steps to secure your devices and data. As well as protecting devices with passwords, this may include:
Routinely ensuring devices are up to date with the latest version of software. New weaknesses are constantly being found, and patches are released regularly to fix security gaps. Hitting the “update later” option could leave your system vulnerable to attack.
Auditing devices on a regular basis. Companies increasingly allow employees to connect their own devices to company networks (what’s known as “bring your own device”), but this can create security headaches. Keep a record of every device that has access to your network, including company devices, and ensure all devices are up to date with the latest operating system.
Segmenting networks so that different parts of the network that don’t need to talk to each other are kept isolated from each other. Similarly, if something doesn’t need to be connected to your network, then don’t connect it.
Keeping an eye out for botnets. Analyzing your network traffic is the best way to spot this. If you notice your devices are habitually connecting or sending data to destinations you don’t recognize, they may need updating or be taken offline.
Blockchain (Trend 6) may play an increasing role in IoT security. According to one report, the use of blockchain technology to secure IoT devices and data doubled during 2018.8 The powerful encryption used to secure blockchains makes it very hard for attackers to penetrate even one part of the chain.
How to Prepare for This Trend
Despite security threats, the IoT offers incredible opportunities for businesses looking to better understand their customers, streamline operations, create new customer value propositions, and drive revenue – providing you prepare your organization accordingly. Here are a few key steps to help prepare for this trend:
Consider how the IoT relates to your overarching business strategy. For the IoT to deliver real value, it must be linked to your business goals. What is your business trying to achieve – for example, understanding customers better, reducing operating costs – and how could the IoT propel your business towards those goals?
If you make products, consider whether you could make those products more intelligent. In this age of smart everything (even toilets!), customers increasingly expect their everyday goods to provide more intelligent solutions.
Don’t overlook data storage needs. The IoT brings with it enormous amounts of data. Do you have the storage and computing power to store and make sense of all that data?
Think about how you’ll analyze all that data. There are lots of off-the-peg solutions designed to help you make sense of your IoT-related data.
Make sure your IoT data is accessible to those who need it. Capturing all this data is great, but it must be useful. That means various people in the company need to be able to access and interpret the data, so that they can make better decisions, streamline operations, and so on.
Create a clear IoT security strategy that sets out which department is responsible for minimizing the threat of attack through connected devices, who is responsible for auditing and updating machines on the network, and what to do in the event of a breach.
Notes
1 1 Do you know the tenets of a truly smart home? Wired: www.wired.com/brandlab/2018/11/know-tenets-truly-smart-home/
2 2 More than 100 million Alexa devices have been sold: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/04/more-than-100-million-alexa-devices-have-been-sold/
3 3 Hirotec: Transforming Manufacturing With Big Data and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT): www.bernardmarr.com/default.asp?contentID=1267
4 4 Siemens AG: Using Big Data, Analytics And Sensors To Improve Train Performance: www.bernardmarr.com/default.asp?contentID=1271
5 5 ServiceMax: How The Internet of Things (IoT) and Predictive Maintenance Are Redefining the Field Service Industry: www.bernardmarr.com/default.asp?contentID=1268
6 6 Smart Dust Is Coming. Are You Ready? Forbes: www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/09/16/smart-dust-is-coming-are-you-ready/#27afb4125e41
7 7 Lessons from the Dyn DDoS Attack, Schneier on Security: www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/11/lessons_from_the_dyn.html
8 8