{"id":80253,"date":"2016-05-08T18:39:22","date_gmt":"2016-05-08T22:39:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rbach.net\/blog\/index.php\/"},"modified":"2021-08-08T20:39:50","modified_gmt":"2021-08-09T00:39:50","slug":"wearables-growing-enterprise-risk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rbach.net\/index.php\/wearables-growing-enterprise-risk\/","title":{"rendered":"Wearables – Growing Enterprise Risk"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Wearables<\/a>Market research firm Tractica<\/a> predicts<\/a> that the high levels of interest<\/strong> will drive worldwide shipments of wearable computing devices for enterprise<\/strong> and industrial from 2.3 million in 2015 to 66.4 million units by 2021<\/strong> and could reach<\/a> 75.4 billion by 2025<\/strong>. This means there will be a total of 171.9 million wearables<\/a> in the wild by 2021.<\/p>\n

The report<\/a> at FierceMobileIT<\/em><\/a> cites a large number of trials or deployments<\/strong> with a diverse set of wearables<\/a> across a variety of industry sectors for the growth.\u00a0 Tractica research director Aditya Kaul explained the prediction,<\/p>\n

\"diverse<\/a>In the past year, the enterprise and industrial wearables market has moved into an implementation phase, with the focus shifting from public announcements to the hard work that needs to be done behind the scenes to get wearables rolled out at commercial scale.<\/em><\/p>\n

Tractica noted a range of new IoT use cases are emerging for workplace wearables. The new uses are focused on application markets like; retail, manufacturing, healthcare, corporate wellness, warehousing and logistics, workplace authentication and security, and field services.\"Estiamted<\/a><\/p>\n

The market research firm believes the primary wearable device categories will be; smartwatches, fitness trackers, body sensors, and smartglasses, There will also be other niche categories that will play a role for specialized use cases.<\/p>\n

\"Internet<\/a>The report does concede that in terms of unit volumes and revenue, enterprise and industrial wearables are still a very small part of the IoT overall market. Wearable’s share of the total market will grow over time, according to Tractica.<\/p>\n

Wearables\u00a0proliferation does not bode well for IoT or enterprise security<\/a>. A recent survey<\/a> of 440 IT pros by IT networking company Spiceworks<\/a> found that enterprise wearables are most likely to be the cause of a data breach out of all Internet of Things devices connected to a workplace network.<\/p>\n

\"IoT<\/a>According<\/a> to FierceMobileIT<\/em>, the survey found that 53% of IT pros believe wearables are the least secure of all IoT devices. Overall, 90% of those surveyed think IoT makes workplace security more difficult. Spiceworks also found that only one in three of those surveyed are preparing for the tidal wave of these devices.<\/p>\n

\"IoT<\/a>The number of companies allowing wearables on the network has jumped from 13% in 2014 to 24% in the current Spiceworks survey. That’s a significant jump, and especially worrisome for the two-thirds of organizations putting off a proper security protocol<\/a>. 41% of those surveyed said that their organizations have a separate network for connected devices, 39% allow them on the corporate network and 11% don’t allow IoT in any capacity.<\/p>\n

Enterprise IoT devices aren’t the only reason IT pros should worry, as Andrew Hay, CISO of DataGravity, told<\/a> FierceMobileIT <\/em>at the RSA conference this year. Workers are bringing consumer-grade IoT devices into enterprise environments, too. In other words, IT pros don’t have a choice at this point but to seriously consider security measures for IoT.<\/p>\n

rb-<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I first covered IoT security holes<\/a> in 2011. In 2014, I wrote about<\/a> HP research which found on average 25 security flaws per device tested. <\/strong>If these stats are right, there will be almost 4.3 billion security flaws in the wild<\/strong>. <\/em><\/p>\n

Some of the security flaws HP pinpointed<\/a> in wearables during 2015 included:<\/em><\/p>\n