Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

According to Gartner, there will be more than 20 billion Internet of things devices in the world by 2020. About 40% of this will be deployed in enterprises to monitor air quality in factories, improve energy efficiency in offices, track assets throughout the supply chain, detect equipment failures, and so on. These devices will also transmit gigabytes of data across thousands of IT networks, posing new challenges in management, data governance and compliance.

The Internet of things is a place where information technology and operation technology are combined. Here, the data system that keeps the enterprise running merges with the product machines sold by the manufacturing enterprise. Its world will never be the same.

"the impact of the Internet of things on the data center in the future will be amazing," said Mike Schulz, senior chief architect at SPR, an IT consulting firm. "the large number of devices that transfer information to the data center will continue to expand the security, connectivity and operational problems currently facing the data center." In other words, integrating IT/OT is not easy.

There are four basic elements that networking professionals need to understand before they begin: expected complexity, lack of standards, and the challenge of Internet of things interoperability. When large enterprises adopt the Internet of things, the number of devices that network engineers must manage can be increased by several orders of magnitude, and the amount of data transmitted through the network will increase accordingly.

"you will have 100000 devices, each requiring only a small amount of data, but thousands of open, lossy network connections." Said Zachary Crockett, chief technology officer of Particle, a provider of the Internet of things.

Jason Sheffield, chief technology officer of Dell's Internet of things and Edge Computing company, says these devices could, in turn, take advantage of any of the thousands of connection protocols currently available, most of which are proprietary.

"there are so many divisions that some people think there will be a magical standard Internet of things protocol to rule the world," Shepherd said. "but that will never happen, and the closer you get to the edge of the device, the more operating systems, hardware and programming languages you will see."

Internet of things devices also rely on a variety of wireless protocols that are not common in data centers, from ZigBee and LoRA to newly hatched standards such as LTE categories M1 and NB1. Crockett said that the combination of know-how and immature communication protocols could lead to some errors.

"A software developer was pulled into an Internet of things project to write embedded firmware." "but they didn't expect that there would be 50 different types of responses that would cause the device to go wrong and restart," he said. people on the network will see errors they have never seen before, and they will see a lot of their diversity. many people may think of these errors as attacks, but in fact they are just misuse of devices. "

Shepherd points out that open source projects such as Linux Foundation's EdgeX Foundry, which allow different Internet of things devices and applications to interact over standard API, should help solve some interoperability issues regardless of operating system or hardware. Devices and applications using the EdgeX framework are just beginning to emerge, and the project plans to launch a certification program for EdgeX-compatible components by April next year.

Ready to migrate to edge computing

When it comes to the Internet of things, delay is the biggest enemy. As thousands of devices are distributed in offices, factories, hospitals, and remote areas, more and more data and computing resources will reside on the edge of the network.

Gartner predicts that by 2022, 75 per cent of enterprise data will be generated and processed at the network edge, which will lead to many new data governance issues.

"you don't want all the data to be transferred to the network," Clavin said. "you need to determine how much data you need to analyze it accurately, and whether you are analyzing it on the device, at the edge, or on the network.

Understand the importance of security practices in the Internet of things

When a hospital adds an automatic insulin dispenser to its network, or a nuclear power plant uses embedded sensors to measure radiation levels, safety can really be a matter of life and death.

However, IoT devices are usually the most vulnerable systems on the network, says Aditya Gupta, chief executive of Attify, which provides penetration testing and training for IoT security.

However, Aditya Gupta, chief executive of Attify, which provides security penetration testing and training for the Internet of things, said Internet of things devices are often the most vulnerable systems on the network. "they are more vulnerable because they are often built without security concerns," he said. when we conduct penetration tests for companies, we usually find five to six devices in the network, and we can attack them and use them to turn to other corporate assets. "

"if I have a network background, I want to learn how hardware communication protocols work inside the firmware, how to sniff radio signals, and how to use mobile applications to reverse API," he said. "the learning curve is steep, and that's why we decided to create these courses to master the security of the Internet of things."

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