Challenges of Industrial IoT (IIoT) from Cybersecurity perspective

As we know consumer IoT market sustained with products like smart lights, smart speakers (Alexa, google home) and so on.

They are becoming part of day to day lifestyle of millennials and gen-z population to say at least.

However,

Industrial IoT is still seen as a challenge then opportunity amongst many, the IoT industry, the products and technologies have advanced but the actual market did not catch up with the pace.

Majority organizations are still working on improving cyber maturity of OT compared to few which are also transforming their environments to be IoT ready and developing new business models leveraging benefits of the technology itself albeit facing scaling challenges at a global level.

Industrial IoT is powerful but it will bring on these new security challenges that organizations need to keep in mind while working on IoT roadmap and think of ways to deal with them at scale -

1?? ?????? ???????????? ??????????????????s emerges for the converged IT-OT landscape for enterprises at scale. With possibilities to integrate with 3rd parties, supply chain providers and distributors. This will not only open new communications and increased data flow outside of the organizations but also let adversaries target the broader ecosystem to infiltrate into organizations network if vulnerabilities are exploited by adversaries and found.

2?? ???????????????????? ???????????????????? along with increased firewall monitoring and firewall rule changes for limiting outbound connections to the internet due to data privacy paranoia.

3?? ???????????? ???????????????? ???????????????????????? for secure IIoT implementations, organizations are not able to pick the right approach to security architecture for the transforming network with increased communication flows, and data sources that are being supplied to extended ecosystem network of suppliers, 3rd party providers which can be uni or bi-directional for benefiting both parties as per the mutual use case.

This was a brief purview of some challenges but their are right solutions and approaches that done can make IIoT implementations more secure.

The first step towards IIoT security journey according to me is outlined in this article where I try to present a approach at very high level - How should an organization approach the IIoT security problem ?? [Part-1] | LinkedIn

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The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organization or its member firms.