Ensuring security while benefitting from the
opportunities offered by IoT is front-of-mind for operators, as technology and
services gain momentum and maturity.
According to reports by Mobile World Live, Raul Azevedo, product development VP at WeDo
Technologies (pictured, right), summed up the situation: “Our customers are
concerned with 5G and IoT, which will bring a huge diversity of scenarios which
we’ll have to handle. The volume of data is exploding, the speed of that data
will be real-time, and they are concerned how to address that.”
The primary challenge of IoT is the complexity and
diversity of the landscape. Operators will not be providing services alone: a
broad set of device makers, platform providers and vertical market applications
will also be added to the mix, any of which can introduce weakness into the
chain.
Eric Priezkalns, who sits on the committee of the
Risk & Assurance Group, said: “We are trusting a lot of devices to all be
secure, and when we should know they aren’t all going to be. There are lots of
potential risks for our customers. Can you imagine how much money is spent on
security and how advanced the technology can be, when we are talking about
small, cheap battery powered devices?”
And for the operator, there is a significant
downside attached to this: “You might say ‘it’s not my fault if the device
wasn’t very good’, but who are people going to complain to, who are they going
to blame? They are going to blame the telco, they are going to complain to the
telco, because that’s who they can complain to; that’s who they recognise. They
aren’t going to complain to lots of small IoT manufacturers,” he continued.
On the same theme, Azevedo commented: “If you have
an insecure network or an insecure device polluting your secure ones, for sure
you will have a problem. We will need to find a way to monitor the different
layers of this complex architecture, and it won’t be easy also to solve the
liability problem. Data will be really important to find out who is liable
within this long chain.”
With much of the focus on IoT around connecting industries,
Andreas Manolis, group head of strategy and risk for BT Group (pictured, left),
said the “biggest issue is the home network”, where consumers can quickly and
cheaply buy devices and connect them to the network.
“All those different providers which can come up in
an instant, create a solution in two or three months, design it, develop it,
release it, it’s the un-smart smart device – it’s un-smart in security,” he
said. While BT ships its routers with an inbuilt firewall, there are examples
of customers looking to disable it if they think it is getting in the way of
their connectivity.
“Customers are so eager, they want the service, they
don’t want any interruption, and they are willing to sacrifice security to do
that,” he warned.
Antonio Vanni, VP in Ericsson’s digital services
unit (pictured, centre), said the company’s approach is to “team up with as
many industries as we can, start anticipating the problems, start figuring out
the specifics of what those problems are going to be, understand the value
chain, the actors, the players, and try to limit your exposure in advance. And
of course, five years from now, we are going to learn things we have no idea
about today.”
New techniques
With the massive increase in connected devices and
service types, Vanni also said that tools such as artificial intelligence (AI)
and machine learning will be crucial to “keep up with the pace of things that
are going to change”.
“We have an idea of the variables that are going to
be impacted, and we are preparing for them specifically with things like
automation. You cannot enable the economics of IoT and connected devices if you
do not have a fully automated value chain,” he said.
For all the concern, BT’s Manolis was keen to turn
the tables, to point out how IoT can be used by operators to help manage their
own operations.
“For us, we see with the new IoT devices that have a
ten year life span and eSIM, you can retrofit these devices on any assets. So
one thing I’m sure we are all aware of is asset assurance: for us, this is a
great opportunity to be able to tag devices, have what weren’t smart devices
retrofitted, to give us information on where they are, are they still active,
should they be active, and what’s their condition. So when you say risk, you
can convert that to risk management.”
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