standards Archives

Tag: standards

Have we been wrong about the Internet of Things all along?

January 5, 2015 Paul Roberts

I’m just slogging through all the articles I marked “to read” but never got around to during the relax-o-frenzy that is the holiday season. One of the better ones I’ve found comes from the Web site Techbitzz.com. On December 31, they ran a nice and succinct write up that addresses one of the most confusing nomenclature problems in the technology world today: the differences between “machine-to-machine” (or M2M) technology and the “Internet of Things” (or IoT). As the article notes, the tendency these days is to just conflate “M2M” and “IoT” – as if the latter is just a newer, cooler term for the former. But that’s not the case. In fact: the two terms refer to very different things. According to the article: “M2M can be defined in simple terms as, ‘Machines’ (can be a sensor, meter, valve etc) using network resources (can comprise of core telecom network, back-end […]

Are Data Lakes A Key To Securing IoT Environments? | Tripwire Blog

January 2, 2015 Paul Roberts

Mitch Thomas over at the security firm Tripwire has a good post on “architecting the security of things” that’s worth checking out. As an incumbent security vendor, Tripwire faces the same challenges and problems as other vendors who came of age securing traditional endpoints and enterprise IT environments. Among them: adapting to a nearly limitless population of new endpoints – many of them small, resource constrained embedded systems. As we’ve noted before: many of these systems aren’t capable of the kinds of interrogations (vulnerability- and malware scans just two examples) that many security tools take for granted.

Are You Creating A Culture of Security?

December 16, 2014 Paul Roberts

Here at The Security Ledger, we’ve written often about the barriers to improving the security practices of software development organizations. It is simple enough to say things like “we have to teach people to write code that is secure. But to actually accomplish that across the myriad of companies that do software development is akin to boiling the ocean. Still, it is a far more manageable problem at the level of a single organization. In fact: it is quite do-able. How? That’s the subject of a Google Hangout Security Ledger is doing this afternoon in conjunction with Veracode. The topic: creating a culture of security within your organization. In the hangout, I will be speaking with Veracode’s Chris Eng and Greg Nicastro about how Veracode, itself, built its secure development culture from the ground up. This is going to be a great discussion. Greg is the Executive Vice President of […]

2015 is Apparently Not The Year for IoT Standards

December 8, 2014 Paul Roberts

CIO has an end-of-year, “crystal ball” interview with Gartner analyst Kristian Streenstrup and Forrester analyst Tim Sheedy on how the Internet of Things is likely to mature and change in 2015. Her high-level thoughts: Applications and use cases for the IoT continue to grow, but progress towards cross-industry standards will not keep pace. (We wrote about whether its already too late to have real standardization in IoT here.) To the extent that there is movement towards IoT standards, it will come within specific industry verticals, with the backing of major firms (like GE) or at the tip of a regulator’s pencil, Streenstrup says. Consumer adoption of IoT will be “slow,” argues Forrester’s Sheedy. Why? No surprise – poor interaction and connectivity. “It’s still a one app- one device model,” Sheedy says, underscoring a problem that gets back to the standards question. Read more via Where is the Internet of Things heading in 2015? […]

Has the IoT Standards Train Already Left the Station?

December 1, 2014 Paul Roberts

The Harvard Business Review has an interesting blog post from last week that looks at the effort to develop standards and promote RFID (Radio Frequency ID), a kind of Ur-technology for our current Internet of Things. Writing on the HBR blog, Thomas Davenport and Sanjay Sarma note that the effort to develop RFID standards, led by MIT’s Auto-ID Labs, provides a possible model for the development of cross-vendor standards for the Internet of Things. However, the authors caution that it may already be too late to achieve consensus on standards to govern Internet of Things communications, given the heavy investment of large and wealthy technology companies in the standards process. One of the most successful elements of the RFID standards effort, which developed and promoted the EPCGlobal standard, was close collaboration between academics, technology vendors and end users.End users of the RFID technology – notably retailer WalMart, Procter & Gamble and […]