The Internet Of Things: Driving Home Advantage

Symantec is investing in the Internet of Things (IoT) – with different verticals like automotive, healthcare, industrial control systems, retail, being key areas of focus. And the reason isn’t hard to understand: IoT – connecting machines and devices together into functioning, intelligent systems – is a big, growing and diverse landscape that has permeated the industry at an astonishing rate and opened up vast opportunities, enabling unparalleled levels of automation and supply chain efficiencies.

Take industrial control systems (ICS), for example: they are now being connected to the Internet on a massive scale, with IoT bringing even greater acceleration of connectivity, not only in the production process and supply chain, but also right across all business processes. Organizations are increasingly embracing these innovations and moving towards improved interconnectivity, in the drive to be more globally competitive and gain a greater foothold in their market sectors.

For Symantec, security, management and analytics are areas where we believe we can bring a lot of value, as billions of devices need to be authenticated, secured and managed, and the data needs to collected and analyzed. In 2011, there were some 9 billion connected devices – the forecast is that, by 2020, the number will have soared to 24 billion.[1] Moreover, based on customer discussions and market insights, concerns over end-to-end security seems to be the biggest inhibitor of IoT projects, with the management of devices being a key value add.

Who is being affected by these perceived downsides to IoT? Just about every sector fears potential threats to its data and/or physical security:

• Auto manufacturers do not want their cars hacked – many of which now have the new 4G capability and embedded Wi-Fi
• Critical infrastructure companies do not want their ICS systems broken into
• And healthcare companies do not want their healthcare devices tampered with.

 Meanwhile, a recent survey of M2M solution providers had ‘Ensuring end-to-end security integration with IT’ as one of the top 3 priorities for 60% of respondents.

Symantec is looking to provide an end-to-end solution by securing, identifying and authenticating the device, signing the code, encrypting the data in transit, managing the device and analyzing the information to provide valuable insights that will neutralize such attacks.

As an example, if you take the automotive industry, for instance, a car may have five apps, perhaps, that will become a platform in the future. The same could be true of POS devices. That means you need to be able to trust the code itself, which importantly Symantec can sign and authenticate.

Another example is of a smart grid environment where the smart meter itself needs to be identified and authenticated to prevent someone from spoofing the identity; the SCADA controller at the backend needs to be protected and the data between the two encrypted to ensure the flow is secured end to end.

A third example is a healthcare environment, such as a hospital with a large number of devices, which needs to be managed and patched to ensure that the devices can stay up to date. This also becomes possible as the devices which were earlier completely isolated become connected and more easily accessible.

Moreover, Symantec understands that different verticals in IoT have different needs and we are adapting and building new solutions to cater to those needs. This includes the challenge posed by legacy devices in many environments like industrials, mentioned previously, which are not going to be replaced quickly; nor are the millions of cars already out there on the road. How do you manage this? You extract the data from the devices to provide the insights that allow operators and/or manufacturers to recognize when the devices are vulnerable and how to counter this.

Interested to hear more? Please contact the Symantec AR Team if you would like a briefing and make sure to check out this blog AllSeen and All-Embracing Alliance for Symantec.