Why is the growth of Enterprise of Things (EoT) inevitable?

Internet of Things is moving rapidly and on its way will embrace every sector. In the near future, there won’t be left a single object that wouldn’t be a part of the IoT ecosystem.

While first, the focus was on consumer experimentation and now it has been shifted to the enterprise sector. Organizations are actively moving up the ladder and taking full advantage of the innovation in technology. For this reason, the adaptation of IoT by enterprises has been termed as ‘Enterprise of Things’.

Further, as IoT and EoT are in full swing, cybersecurity comes down to be the major reason of concern. With everything being digitized, the security of data has become supremely important.

To further comprehend the significance of EOT, cybersecurity and how Blackberry plans to keep your data safe and secure, we held a discussion with Alex Thurber, Senior Vice-President and General Manager of the Mobility Solutions Division at BlackBerry.

What is the significance of cybersecurity in healthcare?

Cybersecurity for healthcare is very critical for a number of different reasons. Per se, the protection of information and privacy because healthcare records are the most personal records for one. It is everything about the person, even what is going to happen to you; It could impact on the person’s job, life or family. Thus, the need to protect that is incredibly important.

And then if you think about all the different technologies in healthcare moving into the idea of the Internet of Things, for example, infusion pumps and health monitors, if these devices got hacked people could die. We actually demonstrated a couple of years ago, somebody being able to hack into an infusion pump and change the dosage where it could kill the patient. It is relatively easy to do as they haven’t put enough of security into the device. So I think Healthcare is the natural fit for very good cybersecurity.

How do you see the growth of EoT and what it means for a digitized India?

The growth of EOT is inevitable. The way technology is moving forward every device is becoming smarter. Once, a device has a network connection it is vulnerable to being attacked. Certainly, that is why Blackberry is focused on EOT and why we think that we are unique in being able to not only harden the EOT device and ensure it is difficult to get hacked but also to manage it from an end-to-end perspective.

And In India, we can really talk about the opportunities of this wonderful country in being able to leverage the technology to move somethings faster, forward faster - it is a great opportunity here. Also, I know one study that shows the growth of IoT in India moving from 3 billion to 9 billion dollars by 2020; so, there is a lot of opportunities here for that. The other thing is since India is not new to IoT but as IoT grows now, it can grow with security. As putting it afterwards is always more difficult.

What are businesses facing today in terms of threats and issues as the use of connected devices explode?

In the security business, we talk about the threat factor, which is just a fancy word for a way to attack something. And the challenge of IoT, particularly for businesses is that most IoT devices are designed for consumers and they don’t have a lot of security built into them. This is a mistake even for the consumers but is particularly bad for an enterprise.

For example, If I take video camera and I have it in my house, then there is a limited risk if someone hacks into that maybe they can see my children; But if I have it in my business they can use that as a lever to get into the network because that device is connected to the internet and to the internal enterprise network. Therefore, it becomes a factor they can use to get in, steal data or even more difficult - install ransomware. Where you are actually locking up someones’ information and forcing them to pay a fine or ransom to get it back.

What BlackBerry is doing to secure the way a company operates; but also, secure the products they make – security at every layer?

Security has to be a layered approach with multiple layers. At the very base, the device itself has to be secure. Also, we have done a great deal of work over the last 20 years - developing our security architecture. We started on phones, which is why our phones so secure.

Further, we have been able to move that to IoT and it begins with secure manufacturing. So, we have a secure manufacturing process, we inject cryptography into the hardware to ensure that its a valid piece of hardware; Then we make changes throughout the OS stack to ensure that not only is it the right OS running on the right device but also it is very difficult for there to be any type of hack or attack on that OS.

As IoT and AI is growing progressively, What is the future of cybersecurity?

AI/Machine Learning is a very important part of cybersecurity going forward. I have been in cybersecurity for about 25 years and I remember previously we updated security once a month and now even Antivirus files they have to be updated four times a day. So, it has gone to the point where we have to use Machine learning to figure out what should be happening on a device and compare that to what is happening and then allow the device to make decisions.

In the end, Alex talked about the DTEK app by Blackberry to secure Android. DTEK is a dashboard into the security status of a smartphone. So, you can enhance your privacy and security level with this app.