Segmentation is better than firewalls for securing IIoT

For a long time now, the Internet of Things has been on the mind of the security and network professionals for more than five years, now. By the looks of it, the security of the Internet of Things devices is the essential area of interest for the Industrial IoT. The connected devices, on the other hand, aren't new; however, most of the people from different IoT firms aren't much familiar as they are usually managed by the OT teams.

However, a massive number of business leaders around the world want to bring together the IT and OT for driving better insights as compared with the combined set of data. There are several advantages of merging OT and IT and when this falls under the IT ownership, it brings a profound impact on cybersecurity. Mostly, because this introduces numerous security threats. Each of them is connected with an endpoint and if this gets breached, it creates a backdoor into several other systems.

Internet firewalls are the most preferred way of protecting IIoT environments. No one could blame IT and OT professionals in this, mainly because it is completely an obvious choice. On the other hand, internet firewalls did also become the fundamental standard to secure anything which is connected to the internet. Nevertheless, when it comes to the environment of IIoT, this is mostly the worst choice due to the complexity and cost.

Instead of utilizing internal firewalls, the security professionals across the world must turn towards the micro-segmentation of the IIoT. Moreover, segmentation is extremely similar when it comes to the utilization of ACLs and VLANs. The separation of the environment is done at the device level and then it has to be managed with several rules rather of the layered network. The IIoT endpoints would require VLAN if the endpoint starts moving. The network requires to be reconfigured for adequate accommodation.

**This post was published on https://www.networkworld.com