IOT stands for Internet of Things and essentially is any device that can wirelessly connect to the internet and it’s like an ecosystem of all of these different devices. The amount of IOT’s and things considered to be one has been growing from at home computers to smartphones, laptops, game consoles etc. Predictions state that for the year of 2022, we’ll have around 29 billion of these devices connected to the internet. Medical means has been the most active use of IOT’s in the last two years. This doesn’t come as a surprise considering all that has happened from 2019 to current day. Using IOT’s to help with this has made life easier by most importantly keeping the workers as safe as possible while also running tests and keeping tabs on what their patients are going through because they don’t run as much of a risk then they do without using them.
With the growing use of IOT’s there is inevitably a huge surge in hackers and different cyberattacks as well. Furthermore there has been a surge in the different exploits that hackers have begun finding and using. They do this because they want access to your IOT’s that have important data on themselves, your workplace, and/or patients.
Common attacks involve attempting denial-of-service (DDOS) by overloading systems with connection requests, causing them to break and possibly expose data, or “hijacking” compute power from devices, which can be used to create botnets that attack other systems, or simply to mine cryptocurrencies. IoT isn’t just a security threat, though – by gathering data on network traffic and usage, connected devices provide fuel for algorithms that are used to predict and prevent cyber attacks.
Edge computing and the IoT go hand-in-hand. Put simply; it means building devices with on-board analytics capabilities. Edge devices use smart sensors such as cameras equipped with computer vision capabilities or microphones with natural language processing functions. In 2022, as more organizations continue to look towards hybrid cloud ecosystems to deliver IoT services to their customers, edge computing will become an increasingly important part of the solution when there’s a requirement to deliver fast, secure insights.
