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October - 2014 - issue > CXO View Point

SECURITY, A MAJOR THREAT TO INTERNET OF THINGS

By Murale Narayanan, Director, Managed Services at EMC India COE
Monday, November 24, 2014
By Murale Narayanan, Director, Managed Services at EMC India COE
Headquartered in Hopkinton, EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) offers data storage, information secutiry, virtualization, and other services. The company has a current market cap of $57.58 billion.

Internet of things has gained immense popularity in the modern wireless world. The strength of the IoT is the potential impact it will have on several aspects of mundane life and the behavior of potential users as well as the business users. In the Internet of Things (IoT) model, many of the objects that surround us will be on the network in one form or another. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and sensor network technologies will increase to meet the new challenge, in which information and communication systems are imperceptibly embedded in the environment. Smart connectivity with current networks and context-aware reckoning using network assets is an essential part of IoT. With the growing presence of WiFi and 4G-LTE wireless Internet access, the development towards ubiquitous information and communication networks is already apparent. According to an updated market forecast from ABI Research, the installed base of active wireless connected devices will exceed 16 billion in 2014, about 20 percent more than in 2013.

The number of devices will be more than double from the current level, with 40.9 billion forecasted for 2020. However, for the Internet of Things vision to successfully emerge, the computing paradigm will need to go beyond traditional mobile computing scenarios that use smart phones and portables, and evolve into connecting everyday existing objects and embedding intelligence into our environment. In order to understand the viability and applicability of this distributed approach, it is necessary to explicitly know its actual features and major principles, including the benefits and disadvantages.

Also, as security and privacy are important factors that will influence the adoption of the IoT paradigm. It is essential to know what are the security and privacy challenges � and benefits � of the distributed approach, and what are the most promising approaches in this field. If the challenges are too difficult and the benefits are less, it might make sense to focus mainly on the centralized approach for IoT deployments. The IoT is extremely prone to the following reasons

1. Its components spend most of the time unattended; and thus, it is easy to physically attack them
2. Wireless communications makes spying simple

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