IoT trends dominating 2018 – Part 3

IoT is shaping up to be a breakout year for IoT deployments as many organizations are incorporating IoT technologies into their products, processes and workflows. As per Gartner’s prediction, there will be nearly 20 billion devices connected to the IoT by 2020, and IoT product and service suppliers will generate more than $300 billion in revenue.

IoT attacks motivated by financial gains

As per Cisco’s estimate, approximately 1 million new connections per hour will be added to the Internet by 2020, expanding the attack surface and making IoT vulnerabilities more critical and more dangerous.  IoT is a now becoming a critical part of an enterprise’s security posture rather being stick to a massive security risk in the enterprise. The keys to protecting IoT devices from infection and attack are a proactive and dynamic approach to security and a layered defence strategy. When it comes to implementing specific IoT security solutions, companies have adopted the wait-and-see approach for now, and though the IoT security breaches seem futuristic, they are happening now.

IoT will pivot from pilot projects to business value

Business cases and ROI (return on investment) are seen as critical measures for the success of IoT implementations. In 2017 the world explored IoT which led to the explosion of proof of concepts and pilot implementations. 2018 is seeing the continuation of that trend as well as increased awareness about the business value edge technologies bring to the table. Companies that were burned by the ‘Big Data Hype’, where data was collected but little was leveraged, are now assessing IoT engagements and deployments for definitive ROI.