In the age of autonomous everything, absolute trust in the technologies employed will be sacrosanct.
Businesses that are already in and new ones planning to be in the machine-machine and Internet of Things (IoT) realm need to make security a keystone of their entire enterprise.
Why this is becoming a pressing matter now can be exampled by the need for easier user experience when mainframes became mainstream. i.e. when a particular technology becomes a consumer product, the full spectrum of the human behaviour, psychology, aptitude and ineptitude will be waiting on the other side.
In my humble opinion, a business’s success or failure will be heavily dependent on its application of design thinking process which satisfies the largest portion of the above chart. A further boost to its success will come by way of its care towards the Emotional Quotient of people which is affected by corporate social responsibility, environmental impact cognizance and security.
To put too fine a point on it, I want to use two examples – one of which was a controlled demonstration by ethical hackers where Hackers Remotely Kill A Jeep On The Highway and the other, is scarily real – An Unprecedented Look At Stuxnet, The World’s First Digital Weapon. This was 2013 and 2010 respectively. Since then, Internet of Things has become ubiquitous. We now have smart washing machines, smart thermostats, smart cars, smart homes, smart this and smart that. We even have IP cameras installed in our homes. We have to look at each of these devices as possible entry points into our lives.
To come back to my opening statement, the proliferation of these technologies cannot be stopped. Therefore, the onus of providing bulletproof secure IoT products lies primarily on businesses that make such products with the guiding principle that consumers may pay attention to it but shouldn’t have to worry about it.