Peripherals: Security, Management, Monitoring
Alex Sidorov | 10.24.2019
As the number and variety of peripheral devices grows, the ability to secure, manage and monitor them is becoming critical to business, experts interviewed by Information Age say.
Without the ability to secure and easily manage edge devices, edge computing will be inaccessible to many industry applications that require such access most.
How can organizations secure their edge devices to take steps toward proactively managing applications in real time?
Security should be part of the mandate, says Nick Dawson, global director of Knox strategy and business development at Samsung Electronics' enterprise business group. "It should be a fundamental element of the DNA of any given device," he says.
However, a shift in thinking is needed. Users and business partners consider smartphones to be the most important devices that need to be protected. But in reality, a smart aquarium heater can be used by hackers to penetrate.
"Any device connected to the china mobile database should have built-in security," Dawson says.
This is one of the three problems with peripherals: can I trust it (is it secure)? can I control it? can I monitor it?
The main challenge is to exchange information between devices without using the star model. Why not perform calculations near the source of the data instead of sending it to the cloud or data center?
Peripheral Device Management
The number of edge devices that process data close to the source has grown from thousands to millions and now billions. Organizations need a unified platform to manage these growing numbers of devices running Android, iOS, or Linux.
The challenge with managing IoT devices is understanding what you can do with them, says Shah Anand, vice president of product strategy at SOTI. “Some devices have limited functionality,” he says, pointing to devices that don’t have screens and aren’t essential.