Make the Most of the IoT While Minimizing Security Risks – Avaya Blog

I was in London yesterday for IP Expo 2016. I had the pleasure of speaking with many customers and presenting a keynote about the security concerns raised by the Internet of Things (IoT). Below is a summary of what we discussed for those who weren’t able to join me or who did but need a refresh.

Adding millions of new devices, hardware endpoints, and billions of lines of code, along with more infrastructure to cope with this load is, unsurprisingly, creating a vast set of security challenges across all areas of the IoT—a set of challenges the scale of which we haven’t seen before.

Fortunately, the technology industry is working hard to address these issues, and from the network side there are many lessons we can apply from the Internet and BYOD-ready networks.

Let’s face it: the days of a fixed network edge, defined by office and a few home workers using corporate laptops is long gone. And we’ve been living the last several years with the borderless network—or as I like to call it, the Everywhere Perimeter. At Avaya, we’ve built on our fabric networking technology to create a solution that addresses this challenge, providing a layer that seamlessly manages segmentation, stealth and elasticity across the organization. (I recently introduced a series that talks at length about these three core pillars.) This approach makes securing the everywhere perimeter much more practical.

If all this sounds like gobbledygook, I can assure you it isn’t. Here’s an example of how it works: if an IP phone is plugged in, the voice network is automatically and securely extended. If a video surveillance camera is plugged in, the surveillance network is extended. When devices and objects are unplugged, the network retracts, eliminating potential back door entry points to the network. What this means is that organizations can hide much of their networks while protecting those elements that remain visible. The end result: you can’t hack what you can’t see, so businesses can avoid many of the conventional hooks and tools that hackers seek to exploit, while at the same time engaging with their customers and employees in an agile and timely manner via the IoT.

I invite you to learn more about elements of the IoT security that are beginning to impact businesses of all sizes. Take a look at this white paper, which offers a roadmap for implementing smart, multilevel security capabilities.