By Tom Conklin, Ericsson
Powerful and robust communication networks are a foundation of the global economy, and they are already sparking dramatic transformations in industry and society by enabling new ways of innovating,collaborating, socializing and communicating. While this shift to a hyper-connected, open society brings about many opportunities, it will also introduce many new threats, risks and obstacles. As greater value is extracted from networks and new business structures, the threats are also adapting, becoming more frequent, more sophisticated and more impactful.
A secure communications infrastructure which integrates multiple ecosystems, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) is the foundation for the hyper-connected society. Services for society and business will share similar infrastructure but with different security requirements. We expect next generation networks to enable greater reliability, faster throughput and lower latency as user, device & application demands continue to increase. These requirements call for a new generation of services that ensure end-to-end security across diverse/innovative architectural models. Data integrity and protection is one of the top concerns for operators, enterprises, governments and regulators. As data flows across organizational boundaries and nations, it must be protected at all stages - as it is generated, stored, transmitted, and used over both trusted and untrusted ecosystems.
Future networks will be designed to serve a variety of applications and solutions for people as well as business and connected industries such as manufacturing and processing, intelligent transport, smart grids and e-health. This will result in more complex management of security, privacy and trust across the“things” that make up an IoT ecosystem. And it will also result in far reaching dependencies on the data that is created in one IoT ecosystem and consumers of that data. This paper will examine steps and recommendations for ways to bring a practical approach to securing IoT devices, platforms and ecosystems.