Create Trusted IoT, become the King of Sweden?
Internet of Things (IoT) devices continue to become more and more prevalent in our daily lives. Alexa gives us the daily news, smart agricultural sensors help farmers optimize yield, and connected sensors can monitor your pet’s movement and sleeping patterns. All told, IoT is expected to become a $500 billion market by 2022, r the same size as the overall economy of Sweden, 23rd largest in the world.
But as IoT revolutionizes our lives, known and unknown security concerns have people worried. As Mirai and other botnets have given way to newer, more sophisticated botnets, Reaper was recently discovered, putting over 300 million IoT devices at risk. 90% percent of consumers now say that they are concerned about their IoT devices being hacked. Most of those people are worried about either hackers taking over control of these devices or stealing consumers’ personal information using these devices. This trepidation can only lead to a reduction in acceptance of IoT if the industry does not act.
KPMG completed a very interesting study in which they concluded for the long term success of the IoT market, the IoT ecosystem must focus on privacy, trust and security. Contrast this with the fact that service providers and IoT manufacturers only spend 11% of revenues on security. That’s a big gap between customer expectations and ecosystem reality.
[You might also like: The Money Behind DDoS Managed Security Services]
There is an opportunity here for service providers to create this safe IoT ecosystem. Service providers’ businesses are based on trust and reliability. Whenever customers are polled on what brands they trust, telecom/cloud service providers are always rated very highly. Service providers’ ability to create large-scale networks that protect user data and secure connectivity make them well positioned to offer IoT devices bundled with volumetric and application security to prevent bad actors from accessing the IoT devices and the data they are collecting. Radware offers technologies that can detect IoT specific attacks and scales using SDN control applications to automatically protect the entire IoT network in real time with no manual intervention or errors. In fact, Radware offers an online calculator that service providers can use to determine the ROI of offering Managed Security Services to customers and capture high margin, high revenue services to grow their businesses by capturing a $400+ million revenue opportunity with $200 million in net operating cash. Try out our calculator here: Radware ROI Calculator
Service providers can deploy security services and offer trusted IOT zones today. Do they want to be the Kings of Sweden?
Conclusion:
Consumers are increasingly worried about their IoT devices being hacked. New botnets targeting IoT vulnerabilities continue. Service Providers (SPs)/IoT device manufacturers spend very little securing their devices. An ecosystem based on trust, privacy and security must be established. Solutions that SPs can scale cost-effectively to create “safe IoT ecosystems” is required and may even be legislated (like GDPR in the U.K.) if the ecosystem doesn’t address.
