IoT Security for Enterprise Networking

IoT is something that a lot of enterprises are grappling with. Specifically, the IT departments are being asked by other departments to put IoT devices on the network, and a lot of times they don't know the vulnerabilities. But, IoT has such strong benefits for the enterprise that the IT guys have to take these requests seriously.

For example, some of our enterprise customers or retail stores. The whole object is to make money or save money. So, when you’re trying to engage the customer and improve the customer experience to try to get them to spend more money, analytics are important. IoT is a great way to be able to collect analytics on an enterprise's customers to help improve that process.

IoT security is a big deal for the IT guys. They know how to deal with a laptop. With IoT devices, they're so heterogeneous; they have different operating systems and different memory capabilities. You don't have clients that you can put on IoT devices, so rather than try to use their old-school ways like what they do with traditional enterprise devices, they really have to start looking at new ways of doing it, such as what we call Software-Defined Perimeter.

When they have such different operating systems and different memory requirements, it really is about isolating them and preventing them from being accessed without authorization from the outside world, and also preventing them from talking to other devices on the inside.

Most enterprises we work with use traditional networking to connect their branches and connect different locations, but when you're adding IoT equipment to those locations, what we're seeing is there's a traditional embedded PC with digital signage, but there's also a front-door switch, which is an IoT device. You have temperature sensors, Bluetooth beacons, WiFi analytics, etc. There's a variety of IoT devices, IoT sensors, and IoT machines that need to be but on the network. That's where Software-Defined Perimeter comes in, because now you can set up an overlay private network that leverages your existing Internet connections but creates a perimeter-secured overlay network, or software-defined network, that is invisible to the outside world and isolates those devices from other enterprise resources.

When you look at branch, when you look at vehicle and other machine deployments, there are a lot of similarities. A lot of them want to be able to have a secure private network so that whatever data is running over there is not going to be accessible by hackers outside. Also, both represent a mix of traditional devices and IoT devices, so you need the flexibility to be able to deal with a low-power solution and a high-bandwidth solution all in the same local environment, and then get that data to the cloud as fast as you can.