By now you may have heard the term “shadow IoT”. For those that haven’t yet, the phrase refers to IoT devices that have been brought into the enterprise without anyone’s knowledge or approval. These rogue devices represent a major security risk, and they have been known to cause serious harm to organizations large and small. In the article that follows, the author details a number of methods that organizations can use to mitigate the risks associated with shadow IoT.
The line between reality and science fiction is beginning to blur. Scenarios that used to be reserved for movies such as Terminator, The Matrix or Inception are quickly becoming a part of our daily lives. The internet itself is something of a technological miracle.
Who could have imagined that we could develop a way to connect the far reaches of the globe into one massive system, and all in the span of a few decades? But things haven’t stopped there. In fact, what we’re seeing today is the next step in the evolution of the internet.
This new step is defined by a tendency to connect more and more devices to the web, leading to what’s called the Internet of Things (IoT). The numbers speak for themselves. In 2017 there were over 8.4 billion IoT devices, and the number is projected to reach 30 billion by 2020, while the market value of IoT is estimated to reach $7.1 trillion in the same year.
The reason for this rapid development is because IoT has shown the potential to revolutionize business, industry, agriculture, medicine and society as a whole. However, this attempt to integrate the physical world with its digital counterpart came with its own share of drawbacks. The topic of this article is one such drawback, the so-called shadow IoT.
