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The rise in smart devices and the internet of things has sparked a security concern across the globe. With experts taking up column inches in newspapers across the globe by claiming smart speakers, fridges or thermostats are a gateway into a user’s home and workplace, something had to be done to restore public confidence.
And the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) has decided to do just that. Installing a ‘benchmark’ for all IoT gateways to give some control over the data being consumed by smart devices, all networks will be required to install a rig to provide real-time intelligence.
The rise of IoT has driven many security vendors to warn about the threat of cyber attacks at home and work. Ian Marsden, CTO at Eseye believes that the ‘cyber threat has never been greater’ than right now. “The simple fact is that more ‘things’ are now connected to the internet than ever before. The continuing spate of attacks have therefore shone a bright spotlight on IoT security – highlighting it to be both weak and ineffective. It’s an issue which the industry has taken seriously for some time, but a sharp rise in both incidents and media headlines will naturally propel the problem up the chain.”
He added: “The crux of the problem stems from the physical time and associated cost involved in IoT deployments around the secure provisioning of devices, and how we get a device onto the network. This has historically been a daunting task, often to the point of impossible.
“In an industry which is at the forefront of innovation, the inability to defend against security threats simply cannot be allowed to hold back the potential benefits which could be yielded from the development of creative IoT prodcuts and services.”
The TPC chose to devise a benchmark for gateways because it feels they’re the devices customers need to measure, especially in terms of data ingestion rate. The organisation believes that IoT users will operate a pair of gateways, clustered for redundancy, a rig the TPCx-IoT Benchmark Committee settled on. Gateways will sit between things and organisation’s data centres. It’s expected they’ll store incoming data from things, do basic analysis to provide close-to-real-time intelligence, as well as determine what data is worth sending to more powerful servers for deeper analytics.
PCR’s Sector Spotlight on Security – in association with BullGuard – is running throughout September 2017 – click here for more articles
