1. | |March 2015
1CIOReview
CIOREVIEW.COM
CIOReviewMaRCh 10 - 2015
T h e N a v i g a t o r f o r E n t e r p r i s e S o l u t i o n s
WIRElEss tEChnOlOgy spECIal
Brian Day
CEO
Rock-Solid
Mobile App
Management
Platform
Apperian:
In My Opinion:
Hank Kafka,
VP-Access
Architecture &
Devices, AT&T
| |March 2015
45CIOReview
CXO Insight
“
In the next century,
Planet Earth will don
an electronic skin. It
will use the Internet
as a scaffold to
supportandtransmititssensations.
This skin is already being stitched
together. It consists of millions of
embedded electronic measuring
devices: thermostats, pressure
gauges, pollution detectors, cameras,
microphones, glucose sensors, EKGs,
electroencephalographs.
These will probe
and monitor
cities and
endangered
species, the
atmosphere,
our ships,
highways
and fleets
of trucks, our conversations, our bodies–even our dreams.”
-Neil Gross
Much-discussed and often-reported in 2014, the ‘Internet
of Things’ (IoT) reached the peak of Gartner Group’s ‘Hype
Cycle for Emerging Technologies’ and appears poised to
begin wide scale market adoption in 2015 and beyond. IDC
forecasted that the market for IoT would reach $7 trillion
by 2020, and estimates in this range were repeated by other
professional prognosticators. By the end of the year, many
companies had managed to fit (if nothing else) an IoT strategy
element into their press releases and annual statements.
The term IoT is itself a bit of a marketing label; in reality
it’s a combination of things: Big Data, Cyberphysical Systems,
Machine-to-Machine Computing, and Ubiquitous/Pervasive
Computing. These nuances didn’t stop IoT from being top of
the fold for anyone covering the 2015 Consumer Electronics
Show. No less than a dozen companies showcased their IoT-
savvy-ness with ‘IoT Pavilions’ and ‘Homes of the Future’,
showcasing everything from Internet-aware washing machines
to sensor-laden bicycles. Everywhere I looked, robots roamed,
coffee pots tweeted successful completion of their savory task,
and cars texted and were texted to. Presuming that standards
can be ratified and interfaces aligned, the dividing line between
our physical lives and digital presence will get a lot thinner and
in some cases disappear altogether.
While it might seem like the Internet of Things is new
and radical, it’s rooted in a set of ideas set forth in 1999 at
MIT by Kevin Ashton. Technology needed over a decade to
By David Witkowski, Founder & Principal Consultant, Oku Solutions
& President, Wireless Communications Alliance
David Witkowski
Enterprise IT
and the
“Internet
of Things”
| |March 2015
46CIOReview
catch up with his vision; it’s been the convergence of low-power
wireless standards like Bluetooth Low Energy, the availability
of efficient and inexpensive processing power (courtesy of
the seemingly relentless march of Moore’s Law), and sensor
technologies borrowed from mobile phones that
have combined to set the stage for IoT’s
emergence as a multi-trillion dollar market
opportunity.
Emergence of the Internet of Things is
following the patterns we saw in previous
technology evolutions. IoT is really just the
“Fourth Wave” of connected computing. In
the First Wave we had mainframe computers,
accessed by terminals and later connected by
early ancestors of the Internet. The Second Wave
gave us personal computers, initially standalone
then connected to servers by modems and
ultimately broadband links. Early mobile devices
(such as the PalmPilot) connected to PCs, and were
later unfettered from their cable leashes by mobile
data networks and evolved to become smartphones.
Today our IoT devices are connected to PCs or smartphones
via Bluetooth or proprietary standards – if I walk away from
my Android phone my Pebble watch will quickly let me know
something is amiss. It’s just a matter of time before the minions
of IoT throw off their smartphone shackles and begin seeking
connections directly to mobile data networks.
$7 trillion worth of IoT is a lot of devices, mostly consumer-
owned. By their nature IoT devices tend to be something that
people keep nearby at all times. Take off my FitBit to recharge
it and I risk falling short on the daily step competition I have
going with my wife and friends. So what happens when people
show up wearing or carrying several IoT devices, all of which are
clamoring for connectivity and access to the Internet?
There’s some precedent for this already, as we saw in recent
years when corporate IT shifted away from company-owned
mobile devices and began implementing Bring Your Own
Device (BYOD) systems and policies. Most of these systems
are controlled and secured by opt-in forms that require
company-provided credentials, or at least an email
and a click-signature acknowledgement of terms
of service. The use model of these systems
range from mostly reasonable to annoyingly
complex, and I can say that in my travels around
the Silicon Valley I never encounter a guest or
public broadband opt-in system that’s exactly like
another – each one is a unique work of security
artistry. Entering sign-in credentials for them on
a PC is fairly easy, on a tablet a challenge, on
a smartphone an exercise in frustration. Some
systems text you a code, others don’t. I’ll say
this; I don’t see myself tapping in network sign-in
credentials via the up-down-enter buttons on my
Pebble watch. If enterprise IT is going to support
IoT onboarding, we need a different approach.
An evolution of the use model set forth by the IEEE 802.11u
standard and Wi-Fi Certified Passpoint (formerly called Hotspot
2.0) may be the solution. Created by the Wi-Fi Alliance in 2012,
Wi-Fi CertifiedPasspoint™ was intended to be “an industry-wide
solution to streamline network access in hotspots and eliminate
the need for users to find and authenticate a network each time
they connect.” Rather than ask a person to sign-in to different
networks, devices enabled with Wi-Fi Certified Passpoint can be
verified from a database containing trusted devices. The same
use model could be applied to IoT devices, allowing enterprise IT
systems to bring customer’s or employee’s IoT devices onboard
without requiring action by the user.
Of course, the question of security in IoT needs to be
addressed. As of today, very little has been done to consider
the security risks created by IoT devices. For the most part IoT
devices are innocuous – they perform simple sensing or alerting
functions and exchange information between devices or between
a device and a user. In some cases (such as cyberphysical
systems) IoT devices can initiate real-world actions such as
moving a lever or knob. Most IoT systems have (at least in their
designed function) little potential to create danger for people or
systems. Do I really care if someone hacks my FitBit and learns
that I walked 11,818 steps yesterday? Probably not.Yet there
could be vulnerabilities we haven’t yet found, and these need to
be considered.
As the Internet of Things revolution takes hold and our IoT
devices become more and more integrated into our daily lives,
enterprise IT will have to determine how to respond. Corporate
IT, hospitality IT, public, and semi-public hotspots will all have
to content with this – it’s not a matter of if, but when this will
need to be addressed.
IoT devices are innocuous
they perform simple
sensing or alerting
functions and exchange
information between
devices or between a
device and a user