What is IoT?
Perhaps the most immediate problem with the IoT, however, is deciding what that term covers. If you take the word of pundits and vendors it seems to encompass everything from baby monitors to my children say during the day, as interesting and intriguing as that might be. But the reality is that these devices have been around for 20 years.” He harks back to a time, early in his career, when he was connecting human-managed systems in a factory to a centralised management system using ladder logic. 1 The aim was to enable just-in-time inventory management and other efficiencies. But as with many IoT projects, this often involved adding interfaces to systems that were never originally designed to have them. “That was the model 20 years ago,” Mackey says. “We’ve just extended it dramatically, connected it to the public Internet and then, with the rise of cybercrime, we’ve looked at it through a riskprofile lens.” The image this lens shows us, he says, is that, “there’s a lot of scary out there – what do we need to do next?” And that’s as far as we’ve got, says Mackey. “On the industrial side of things, there’s tacit recognition that how we’ve been securing these devices and trying to run facilities with a minimum staffing – largely a non-technical staffing at that – presents a real challenge. And then you factor in all of the consumergrade devices that are flowing through Amazon’s shelves, all the way to things that are truly odd, like an Internetenabled Barbie dream house.
