GEC NEWS WIREAccording to Markets and Markets, the IoT market size is estimated to grow from $157.05 Billion in 2016 to $661.74 Billion by 2021, at a CAGR of 33.3% from 2016 to 2021. All industry verticals are undergoing a huge transformation in a bid to move toward affordable, accessible, and quality services to their customers. New applications and use cases, a result of cutting edge technology innovations, are being developed to address the changing industry needs. IoT, in combination with cloud computing and big data, is creating lucrative opportunities for organizations.
“However, the ubiquitous use of a technology in wide ranging areas brings forth risks that range from significant to catastrophic. Nuclear facilities can be damaged overnight by compromising the IoT infrastructure. We have already seen an early avatar of this in the form of Stuxnet,” explained Vinod Vasudevan, Co-founder and CTO at Paladion. “Similarly, nation state attacks are expected to target IoT used in power grids and other utilities. Smart cities can get paralysed in minutes if the IoT infrastructure that automates the processes here gets compromised. IoT risks are complex since IoT technology stack has many new components including IoT sensors, protocols, gateways, and management platforms.”
Thus, IoT security includes many new risk areas that cybersecurity industry is still learning to resolve including cloud & mobility. As an example, there are many IOT protocols in the market today including Zigbee, CoAP, Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), Digital Data service (DDS), and Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT). “There should be certification of the safety of IoT products and components from central authorities backed by government. This can be treated very similar to car safety and certification that we are all used to. IoT security movement has started but there is still a long way to go. Good news is that we can still do things to enhance the barrier to attacks while we wait for industry to accelerate the act,” concluded Vasudevan.
