The Intruders of Things

Gartner predicts that by 2020, IoT security will make up 20 percent of annual security budgets.

2020 seems to be an important milestone for the Internet of Things. That’s the year that Cisco says there will be 50 billion connected devices and also the year Gartner notes that over 50% of major new business processes and systems will incorporate some element of the Internet of Things.

That’s the good news.

A recent Symantec Internet Security Threat Report says there are 25 connected devices per 100 inhabitants in the US. Minimum 25 entry points to your personal information, not counting your front door, personal computers, compromised ATMs and other data sources. As your connected devices grow, so will your exposure. And with no clear methods of identifying and authenticating connected devices, enterprises will have a challenging time getting a handle on how many employee shirts, shoes, fitness trackers, and smartwatches are connected to the corporate network. And more importantly, what do they have access to?

The sneaky spreadsheet macro malware will soon be a spoofed critical alert requiring instant attention.

Healthcare is a prime target for IoT attacks and researchers have already compromised several devices revealing personal info and worse, causing the devices to malfunction. ‘Hey, why isn’t my heart beating any……’

The chaos on the feature first consumer side can be frustrating but nothing compared to industrial and manufacturing.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) focuses on industrial control systems, device to network access and all the other connective sensor capabilities. These attacks are less frequent, at least today, but the consequences can be huge – taking out industrial plants, buildings, tractors, and even entire cities.

If you think data protection and privacy are hot now, just wait until 2020. Like BYOD, security pros need to be ready for the inevitable not just the potential of a breach. While the gadgets get all the interest, it’ll be the back end data center infrastructure that will take the brunt of the traffic – good and bad.

Organizations need an infrastructure that can both withstand the traffic growth and defend against attacks. Over on F5’s Newsroom, Lori MacVittie talks about the 3 Things the Network Must Provide for IoT – delivery, security and visibility. Things that can communicate securely with back-end apps, ADC’s that can understand the languages of things (like MQTT) and the ability to see what is going on with the things.

According to TechTarget, ensuring high availability of the IoT services will rely on boosting traffic management and monitoring. This will both mitigate business continuity risks, and prevent potential losses. From a project planning standpoint, organizations need to do capacity planning and watch the growth rate of the network so that the increased demand for the required bandwidth can be met.

If you already have BIG-IP in your back yard, you’re well on your way to being IoT ready. You got the network security to protect against inbound attacks; you can offload SSL to improve the performance of the IoT application servers; you can extend your data centers to the cloud to support IoT deployments; scale IoT applications beyond the data center when required and both encrypt and accelerate IoT connections to the cloud.

A pair of BIG-IPs in the DMZ terminates the connection. They, in turn, intelligently distribute the client request to a pool (multiple) of IoT application servers, which then query the database servers for the appropriate content. Each tier has redundant servers so in the event of a server outage, the others take the load and the system stays available.

The BIG-IP tuning may vary but it is still all about nodes, hosts, members, pools, virtual servers and the profiles and services applied. The BIG-IP platform is application and location agnostic, meaning the type of application or where the application lives does not matter. As long as you tell the BIG-IP where to find the IoT application, the BIG-IP platform will deliver it.

Published Aug 23, 2016

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