At ISE 2020 in Amsterdam, the most popular talk on Wednesday's ISE Main Stage focused on IoT, or more correctly… IoTageddon.
What's IoTageddon?
Editor-in-Chief at Channel Media Europe, Bob Snyder linked five important facts to illustrate the dangers ahead with IoT.
First, IoT began life some years ago as a "dumb" machine-to-machine technology and now is being touted as the "Intelligence of Things.” Snyder drew a comparison between drones without cameras and IoT without sensors.
Second, he reported industry analysts have an impressive list of more than 1000 IoT platforms selling on the market today. Yet experts declare, after some investigation, that only 400 have true platform capabilities.
Third, Ericsson, Cisco and many others predicted in 2010 we would have 50 billion IoT devices by 2020. But we now only have about 9 billion (even if you include smartphones). Snyder called the missing 41 billion devices "the biggest mistake in market prediction in the history of the IT business—and perhaps in the history of all business."
Fourth, many sources report high failure rates for trial IoT projects. Cisco claims as many as 76% fail. That's 3 out of 4. If IoT was a sport, it would be thrown out of the game.
Lastly, Snyder pointed out how there is no adoption of a common security standard for IoT. Billions of devices and all with less security than your grandma’s PC. He referenced a web site which calls itself "the search engine of the internet of things" where anyone can go and find the list of millions of unsecured devices. And, despite this public shaming, still hardly anyone does anything to get their devices off that list.
IoTageddon comes as more and more IoT platforms reach out aggressively selling IoT while the universe of unprotected things grows and grows. Snyder predicted very big, very public and very embarrassing security hacks will happen before people react and before they start to change. Human nature, insists Snyder, seems to leave us watching planetary climate change coming at us like an oncoming freight train and yet we are unable to get off the tracks until the train hits us.
If that seems pessimistic, Snyder also shared some useful questions to ask before deploying IoT. And 12 steps needed to bring security into the “Intelligence of Things.”
It’s an engaging speech with a structured story line: the link to watch this ISE Main Stage presentation is below.