By the way, there are currently 1.5 trillion–yes, trillion with a “t”–devices that could be connected. Far fewer than 1% of things that could be connected to the Internet currently are.It’s not ridiculous to assume a seemingly isolated malware incursion on someone’s phone can result in undrinkable water for an entire city.įinally, keep the following facts in mind: Now, remember back to that conference call at Starbucks, where your phone was one degree of separation from another smartphone–perhaps, a smartphone that was infected by a previously undiscovered form of malware. Oh, and don’t forget Industrial IoT, as well, where your devices may be one tiny degree of separation from industrial control systems like SCADA, water purification systems, or an electrical grid. Guess what? I’m one degree separated from other people’s smartphones, and two degrees separated from their IoT devices–at their place of work, in their homes, in their cars, or out in any realm of the digital public infrastructure. Let’s say I’m sipping a latte in Starbucks, participating in a conference call on my smartphone. Every time your employees connect on a network, whether at work, at home, or out in public, they have opened a permanent gateway to your organization’s crown jewels. And, those same devices used for work are increasingly being used on your employees’ home networks, as well as on public WiFi networks. Obviously, all of your employees have a PC, a phone, and probably any number of other digital devices, all connecting at one time or another to a corporate network to access data, applications, services, or other connected resources. Oh, how wrong you would be.Īnd the cybersecurity implications are huge. You may think your IoT connectivity is far more limited than it really is. I’m sure many consumers–and probably even many business executives and board members–don’t fully grasp how true this is. In fact, we’re just six degrees apart from each other, just like Kevin Bacon. Like it or not, know it or not, we are all connected to each other and to every type of device with a sensor or a chip. Our devices–as sophisticated and as digitally affixed to our lives as computers and phones, or as seemingly mundane and disparate from much of our lives as toasters and toys–are constantly building, exploring, and leveraging new relationships among people and machines. Every day, our work, home, and public comings and goings link up, forming associations that may seem fleeting, but in actuality are permanent.
With each new connection point, the IoT becomes larger and more intertwined among people and machines. With tens of billions of connected things–and counting–the IoT is like a giant ecosystem that feeds on itself every second of every minute of every hour of every day. And in the rapidly changing world of technology, nothing better personifies the Six Degrees theory than the Internet of Things (IoT). Most, if not all, of us have heard about the Six Degrees of Separation theory–ostensibly, everyone and everything is just six connections removed from Kevin Bacon–to appreciate just how interconnected our society and our world have become.
You don’t need to be a student of American cinema to know what the movies “Animal House” and “A Few Good Men” have in common: