CISO’s Transformational Role In The Age Of Internet Of Things (IoT)

The role of Chief Security Information Offers (CISOs) has changed over the past few years in an unparalleled way. Needless to mention, these are responsible for security establishment together with managing safety risks and ensuring the protection of data assets. The changing role of CISO is predominantly powered by the Cyber-Physical Systems deployment that includes IoT devices used across multiple applications in different industries. These devices are connected with each other through a strong internet connection which sometimes becomes a prime threat to enterprise security. Now it’s CISO’s responsibility to develop a powerful strategy in order to address the growing security risks.

The chances of cyber-attacks increase, along with the growing deployment of IoT devices in various sectors. However, for agent-based technologies, it is not always possible to safeguard these devices from the security threats so there are no other options left to CISOs other than coming up with a new technology that can seamlessly overcome IoT security risks.

Needless to mention IoT applications are not only limited to enterprises, but it can also connect home, operate municipal activities through smart city applications, you can operate your refrigerator through phone if it is connected with Wi-Fi, you can even operate light, fan, AC, printer and other home devices through IoT sensors. So, the security concern is at its top priority. According to previous research, it was estimated that around 6.5 million connected devices will exist at the end of 2020 now it seems the number has crossed already. This year thousands of new businesses started integrating IoT applications.

Role of CISO in IoT Security

The way businesses started incorporating IoT applications and people relying on these in their regular lives the security and privacy implications required to update so that the business processes can run without security that might lead to a loss of data. Under those circumstances, CISO requires to figure out how to secure these devices that result in better data management.

CISO needs to understand the growing threat of cyber-attack, the nature of which is evolving every day, they need to have a better insight into how it is affecting organization in terms of security risks.

There are numerous attack vectors that can lead to danger within an enterprise set-up, among which worth mentioning is firewall weaknesses, and malicious mobile apps, including malware, downloaded through spear-phishing among the lot.

Some of the elements of the Modern Cyber Security Solution are:

• Visibility
• Security policy creation
• Security policy enforcement
• Utilization

Vendors dealing with visibility and utilization can be distinguished easily, some can be classified as IoT device type while others are focusing on delivering device-specific solutions. Others focus on the details level instead of the uniqueness of protocols.

Plan for the Future

For vendors, it is not easy to detect the security issue and troubleshoot them using vulnerable devices. Companies will require replacing the existing systems with their updated version through the installation of better hardware devices. Within the coming years, they will likely introduce such systems to harness the issue of critical vulnerabilities.

Even for CISOs, the future challenges are difficult to deal with, especially those that are related to connected devices since minute change can disrupt the entire system. The incoming and outgoing traffic visibility also needs to review, but due to lack of resources, tools, and infrastructure, it is not always possible. CISOs are planning to go beyond the computer system to check the security issue of all the connected devices in order to solve them without compromising the existing operations. They need to rely more on the segmentation operation to integrate updated technologies within the existing framework.