FUTURE TECHNOLOGY

As numbers of connected devices scale out so does the attack surface. Fortinet’ s Kalle Bjorn pins down five areas to focus on.

These are just a few of the scenarios that could become commonplace as smart cities take hold over the next few years. Driven by rising urbanisation and fueled by technologies such as the Internet of Things and data analytics, smart cities are on the cusp of explosive growth. Glasgow, Barcelona, Nice, New York City, London and Singapore have already embarked on the trek. The smart city technology market could be worth $ 28 billion annually by 2023, according to Navigant Research.

Smart city initiatives are driven by public sector initiatives. However, they will have a big impact on businesses. CIOs will have to learn how to tap on the new connected city infrastructure for their business. Smart city technologies like IoT and data analytics are expected to drive innovative business ideas in the future.

But the new wave of smart city services and technologies are also expected to create new security vulnerabilities. Here are five areas CIOs should watch out for.

IT fragmentation

The last few years saw a rapid proliferation of cloud services and mobile device adoption in the workplace. The trend has transformed business productivity. But it has also wrecked the tight-fisted control that CIOs used to be able to exert on their IT systems.

CIOs now have to grapple with the idea of employees using unsanctioned cloud services via unsecured phones to hook up to corporate servers and accessing sensitive business data. The expected explosion of IoT devices- researchers estimate that by 2020 the number of active wireless connected devices will exceed 40 billion worldwide- will result in a further fragmentation of IT in businesses.

Instead of fighting the losing battle of trying to lock down devices and services, CIOs should look at protecting

26 Issue 03 INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS