Currently, in terms of business security, many things are changing. Organizations, in addition to protecting their public, private or hybrid cloud, and their on-premises networks, must also start to take care of other things. In this sense, the security of IoT, or what is the same, the Internet of Things (IoT), should also be a priority for most companies. Increasingly, the number of IoT devices will increase, which will translate into more data and more opportunities for attackers.
Therefore, keeping IoT safe in the future is going to make it necessary to protect our networks. If we focus on the devices, it can turn into a never-ending battle that in the end will get more complicated. Next, we will see the reasons.
Risks and dangers that can affect IoT security
The risk faced by organizations increases with the pace of adoption of IoT. According to International Data Corporation estimates by 2025, it is estimated that there will be 41.6 billion connected IoT devices. A worrying fact that aggravates the problem is that these networks of IoT devices are trusted. Additionally, personal IoT devices have recently been added to transport sensitive business data, with 98% of existing IoT device traffic unencrypted.
Today, we need a new approach based on building resilient networks that are ready for IoT . Therefore, the traditional security posture is out of date. Right now, there are too many different types of devices to expect a uniform standard that can guarantee your safety. Also keep in mind that IoT maintenance can be expensive and cumbersome. If we have to individually secure each IoT device on our network for its entire useful life, ensuring that each one has up-to-date software, policies and security, it can be a very complex and difficult task to tackle.
Know what we have connected to our network
There are more and more shadow IoT devices in our home business networks. In this sense, it is important to know what is connected to our networks. Simply identifying IP addresses is no longer enough. We must step up and know what types of devices are in our network. Thus, knowing what a device is for, allows us to know what it should and what it should not do.
Another issue to keep in mind is that IoT devices come and go on your networks, brought in by different departments and different people. Therefore, a static asset check once or twice a year is no longer useful to us.
One of the things to look for is smart monitoring . Here, securing data, access, and network traffic requires machine learning (ML). Thus, machine learning is increasingly used for network monitoring, threat detection, and remediation. It should also be noted that it is just as effective in identifying, monitoring and protecting IoT devices because it can scale these activities in real time.
Network Segmentation, Zero Trust, and IoT Security in the Future
A good proper policy that we should apply is to have proper network segmentation . So when things are done right, IoT devices on critical infrastructure will not be compromised when an employee accidentally clicks on a phishing email. Therefore, by having separate zones, it will serve to prevent threats from moving throughout the network and, in addition, it will make it easier to control IoT devices.
In conclusion, we can draw that maintaining the security of IoT in the future will require the protection of the networks themselves. If we deal only with devices, it will be a never-ending task that will become more and more expensive. Thus, a network approach in which we have visibility, access, real-time monitoring and segmentation, will provide us with an effective solution for our IoT devices. Finally, we recommend you read the tutorial on how to protect our IoT devices from the great increase in attacks.