The ability of objects in the Internet of Things to change the state of environments — in addition to generating data — will cause information security executives to redefine the scope of their security efforts beyond present responsibilities, according to a report from Gartner Inc.
The research firm predicts that IoT security requirements will reshape and expand more than half of all global enterprise IT security programs by 2020 due to changes in supported platform and service scale, diversity and function.
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"The IoT is redrawing the lines of IT responsibilities for the enterprise," Earl Perkins, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement. "IoT objects possess the ability to change the state of the environment around them, or even their own state.”
Securing the IoT expands the responsibility of the traditional IT security practice with every new identifying, sensing and communicating device that’s added for each new business use case, Perkins said.
Traditional "information" technology is now being supplemented by purpose-built, industry-specific technologies that are designed by where and how that technology is used and what function it delivers, the report says.
Although traditional IT infrastructure is capable of many of the emerging IoT tasks, functions that are delivered as purpose-built platforms using embedded technology, sensors and machine-to-machine communications for specific business use cases signal a change in the traditional concept of IT and the concept of securing IT, the firm says.
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