Everyone who has a stake in the internet of things, from device manufacturers to network service providers to implementers to customers themselves, makes important contributions to the security or lack thereof in enterprise IoT, attendees at Security of Things World were told.“The key to all [IoT devices] is that they are networked,” Jamison Utter, senior business development manager at Palo Alto Networks told a group at the conference. “It’s not just a single thing sitting on the counter like my toaster, it participates with the network because it provides value back to business.”“I think the media focuses a lot on consumer, because people reading their articles and watching the news … think about it, but they’re not thinking about the impact of the factory that built that consumer device, that has 10,000 or 20,000 robots and sensors that are all IoT and made this happen.”To read this article in full, please click here
Doctors - particularly the ones that work in emergency rooms – need to have strong stomachs and level heads, since they see illness and injury at their most serious. Violence, accidents and serious diseases are all a matter of routine in the ER.Dr. Christian Dameff is a faculty member at UC San Diego’s medical school, has seen all of that and more, since he’s also a white-hat hacker and expert in medical IoT security. He warned the audience on Thursday at the Security of Things USA convention in San Diego that the state of that security is, frankly, alarming.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Windows Server in the cloud: Can you, should you, and with which provider? + HPE gives up the battle for tier 1 data center customersTo read this article in full, please click here
Doctors — particularly the ones that work in emergency rooms — need to have strong stomachs and level heads, since they see illness and injury at their most serious. Violence, accidents and serious diseases are all a matter of routine in the ER.Dr. Christian Dameff is a faculty member at UC San Diego’s medical school, has seen all of that and more, since he’s also a white-hat hacker and expert in medical IoT security. He warned the audience on Thursday at the Security of Things USA convention in San Diego that the state of that security is, frankly, alarming.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Windows Server in the cloud: Can you, should you, and with which provider? + HPE gives up the battle for tier 1 data center customersTo read this article in full, please click here
Doctors — particularly the ones that work in emergency rooms — need to have strong stomachs and level heads, since they see illness and injury at their most serious. Violence, accidents and serious diseases are all a matter of routine in the ER.Dr. Christian Dameff is a faculty member at UC San Diego’s medical school, has seen all of that and more, since he’s also a white-hat hacker and expert in medical IoT security. He warned the audience on Thursday at the Security of Things USA convention in San Diego that the state of that security is, frankly, alarming.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Windows Server in the cloud: Can you, should you, and with which provider? + HPE gives up the battle for tier 1 data center customersTo read this article in full, please click here
Tech Data may walk softly in terms of public perception – the Florida-based company isn’t exactly a household name – but it carries a big stick in the IT industry. It’s one of the biggest distributors and resellers out there, partnering with the majority of the biggest names in technology and boasting net sales of more than $26 billion in its last full financial year.Yet even major players like Tech Data have to bend to the new realities of the technology industry. We caught up with Michelle Curtis, director of IoT solutions at Tech Data, at a Microsoft IoT event in Boston on Monday.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: After virtualization and cloud, what’s left on premises? + Internet of things definitions: A handy guide to essential IoT termsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s an often-impenetrable alphabet soup of protocols, standards and technologies around the Internet of Things. Here’s our attempt to wipe away some of the fog, in the hopes of making the language of IoT just a little bit clearer.6LoWPAN – Possibly the most tortured acronym of even this distinguished group, 6LoWPAN is “IPv6 over low-power personal area networks.” Sheesh. The idea is to placate people that say it’s not really the “Internet” of Things without Internet protocol, so it’s essentially the IPv6 version of Zigbee and Z-wave.AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) – AMQP is an open source standard that allows disparate applications to talk to each other across any network and from any device. AMQP is a part of numerous commercial middleware integration offerings, including Microsoft’s Windows Azure Service Bus, VMware’s RabbitMQ, and IBM’s MQlight. It was initially developed by the financial sector for fast M2M communication, but has begun to be used in IoT projects.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM is trying to be the brains behind the increasingly brawny presence of IoT in all corners of the business world, using its AI expertise to offer insight into piles of new data, provision new implementations, and help drive decision-making.The company thinks that its Watson AI is the ideal back-end for IoT, which is an area that few companies are addressing so directly. There’s a great deal of uptake around technology that connects new devices to the network, but comparatively little that actually does meaningful work on the floods of new data provided as a consequence.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: REVIEW: Turbonomic, VMware virtualization management tools + Cisco snaps up streaming-data startup PerspicaTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Canonical founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth is one of the most prominent people in open source software.Ubuntu, the GNU/Linux-based operating system that he helped birth in 2004 is now one of the best-known open source projects in the world, accounting for a vast proportion of the Linux VMs in the public cloud and huge numbers of connected devices.He sat down with Network World Senior Writer Jon Gold to talk about the future of IoT and the evolution of technology.NW: One thing that’s interesting about IoT is that new tech is coming from companies that you wouldn’t consider traditional IT vendors.MS: The thing I personally love about IoT is that it’s genuine entrepreneurship – but the thing about IoT is that literally anybody that finds themselves in a particular situation is able to see how taking a small piece of electronics and some software in a particular context to make something better. So that makes it just a lot of fun from an entrepreneurial point of view.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
We’ve reached the sharp part of the adoption curve for IoT, as a recent study shows skyrocketing adoption of the technology across all business sectors for a huge range of different purposes.Vodafone’s annual IoT barometer this month found that 84% of the 1,278 senior IT decision-makers who responded had increased their adoption and use of IoT solutions in the past year. 12% of the respondents had at least 10,000 connected devices in use at their company, while 6% had more than 50,000 in operation.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Forrester: 3 ways IoT can drive business value + FAQ: What is NB-IoT?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When Mark Shuttleworth founded Canonical in 2004, the idea behind the company was simple – promote the use of Ubuntu Linux as a desktop operating system. Fourteen years later, things have gotten a lot more complicated, as the prominent open source software vendor eyes the IoT market.Canonical’s still flying the flag for desktop Linux, but the company’s real business is in the cloud – it claims that Ubuntu accounts for about 60% of all Linux instances in the major public clouds – and it’s hoping to make its mark in the next-buzziest part of the technology sector, the Internet of Things.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Nvidia gets broad support for cutting-edge Volta GPUs in the data center + A lack of cloud skills could cost companies moneyTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
NB-IoT, that must stand for “no big IoT,” like “no big deal?”Awful. Why don’t you leave the jokes to me?Fine, fine. So what is NB-IoT, really?First of all, it’s narrow-band IoT, and it’s a communication standard designed to let IoT devices operate via carrier networks, either within an existing GSM carrier wave, in an unused “guard band” between LTE channels, or independently.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Aruba rolls out security fabric designed for IoT and the digital era + Survey: Enterprise IoT faces skills shortage, security challengesTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The tech industry’s approach to becoming a part of the IoT landscape is reminiscent of a quilting bee – a large number of participants approaching a central problem from a wide array of different angles and taking on different areas of responsibility.And that’s a good fit for the IoT market – companies have wildly diverse sets of needs, requiring a commensurately diverse set of technological capabilities. A factory might need a sophisticated, integrated system that can both manage complicated manufacturing equipment and track products, while a nearby hospital might need to bring expensive medical equipment onto the network.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: 3 real-world examples of IoT rolled out in the enterprise; 5 IoT trends that will define 2018+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s no longer necessary for enterprises to install dedicated Wi-Fi controllers in their data centers because that function can be distributed among access points or moved to the cloud, but it’s not for everybody.While the arrangement is often referred to as controllerless, that is a misnomer; there is still a control plane, it’s just not located in a dedicated device.The traditional data-center deployment of a controller really isn’t a strict necessity for enterprise WLAN use any more, according to Farpoint Group principal Craig Mathias,+RELATED: 5 Wi-Fi analyzer and survey apps for Android; The future of Wi-Fi: The best is yet to come+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A survey of technology decision-makers at mid- to large-scale enterprises found that IoT adoption is coming to the vast majority of businesses within the next two years, but many of those businesses aren’t yet ready to cope with the change.A major part of the problem is a perceived skills gap. Of the 500 IoT-involved technology pros surveyed, just 20% said that they “had all the skills they needed” to successfully implement their organization’s planned IoT projects.The other four out of five respondents to the survey conducted by Vanson Bourne and backed by UK-based satellite communications company Inmarsat said that they had some degree of need for additional IoT skills.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s unusual for technology vendors of sufficient size not to be the most powerful companies in any market space they enter – the mere fact that they’re there arranges other players into a “Google/Microsoft/Amazon against everybody else” formation.That’s why, according to experts, the heterodox, wide-open IoT platform marketplace is so strange – it’s an area in which all the traditional powerhouses of IT are playing, but they’re not dominating market share the way they usually do.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: How Google is speeding up the Internet + Cisco brings its SDN to Amazon, Microsoft and Google’s public cloudTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The next great leap forward in Wi-Fi got a little closer to reality Tuesday with Broadcom’s announcement of a new family of chips designed to comply with the not-yet-finalized 802.11ax standard, but you might not need to game-plan for the arrival of 802.11ax products in the enterprise for quite awhile.However, thanks to several factors, including an unusual adoption cycle, the capabilities of existing Wi-Fi hardware and the standards process itself, 802.11ax is unlikely to take enterprise wireless customers by storm before late 2018, according to experts.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Does MU-MIMO really expand Wi-Fi capacity? + 3 real-world examples of IoT rolled out in the enterprise + How Wi-Fi could get a boost from Li-FiTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The next great leap forward in Wi-Fi got a little closer to reality Tuesday with Broadcom’s announcement of a new family of chips designed to comply with the not-yet-finalized 802.11ax standard, but you might not need to game-plan for the arrival of 802.11ax products in the enterprise for quite awhile.However, thanks to several factors, including an unusual adoption cycle, the capabilities of existing Wi-Fi hardware and the standards process itself, 802.11ax is unlikely to take enterprise wireless customers by storm before late 2018, according to experts.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Does MU-MIMO really expand Wi-Fi capacity? + 3 real-world examples of IoT rolled out in the enterprise + How Wi-Fi could get a boost from Li-FiTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The next great leap forward in Wi-Fi got a little closer to reality Tuesday with Broadcom’s announcement of a new family of chips designed to comply with the not-yet-finalized 802.11ax standard, but you might not need to game-plan for the arrival of 802.11ax products in the enterprise for quite awhile.However, thanks to several factors, including an unusual adoption cycle, the capabilities of existing Wi-Fi hardware and the standards process itself, 802.11ax is unlikely to take enterprise wireless customers by storm before late 2018, according to experts.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Does MU-MIMO really expand Wi-Fi capacity? + 3 real-world examples of IoT rolled out in the enterprise + How Wi-Fi could get a boost from Li-FiTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A bill submitted this week to the U.S. Senate could be the first step toward fixing IoT security, requiring that device makers who want to do business with the federal government meet basic security standards.The bill mandates that any Internet-connected device provided by government contractors be free from known security vulnerabilities, be able to receive regular software updates, and use up-to-date communications and encryption industry standards.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: IDC: SD-WAN growth is exploding for at least the next 5 years + The 10 most powerful companies in enterprise networkingTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IoT security is a headache, a mess and several other flavors of annoying for any enterprise, but in healthcare, it can be literally life and death.Compromising any connected device has two main consequences – one is to enlist devices into a botnet, like the security camera-capturing Mirai, and the other is to offer a passage deeper into any infrastructure the device is connected to.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: What is IoT? + Bluetooth Mesh takes aim at enterprise IoT, but hasn’t taken flightTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here