If you are familiar with industrial control systems (ICS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), you may find that their development is similar to that of IoT. IoT is more of an evolutionary step in ICS than a revolutionary step: the IoT world is borrowing the same protocols, software development approaches and procedures from the ICS world, which has been networking physical devices for decades. Manufacturers, the oil and gas industry, the energy sector and many other industries have been using ICS and SCADA systems since at least the 1980s.
What does that mean from a practical perspective to the brave new world of IoT? First of all, it explains why early IoT devices have poor, non-updateable firmware, no secure software upgrade paths, little to no authentication and virtually no encryption. After all, most ISC and SCADA systems didn’t, either. Many still don’t.
Many industries are doing their best to apply workaround technologies to their SCADA systems. They can’t update the operating systems or firmware of the software that controls robots, power grids and water delivery systems, so, they install intermediate firewalls, sophisticated security information and event management (SIEM) software and other tools to monitor the issues.
I now refer to IoT as SCADA 2.0. Why not? If IoT is best explained as adding IP addresses to any device, I would image that we should consider IoT an evolutionary extension, really, of what ICS systems have been doing for some time, now.
A lot of folks have started using the term operational technology (OT) as the master concept that contains ICS/SCADA and IoT devices. Yes, operational technology folks started thinking in terms of how to manage dams, pipelines and power grids. But, many of the same principles apply. I would imagine that moving forward, IoT will be discussed as a subset of OT.
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What does that mean from a practical perspective to the brave new world of IoT? First of all, it explains why early IoT devices have poor, non-updateable firmware, no secure software upgrade paths, little to no authentication and virtually no encryption. After all, most ISC and SCADA systems didn’t, either. Many still don’t.
Many industries are doing their best to apply workaround technologies to their SCADA systems. They can’t update the operating systems or firmware of the software that controls robots, power grids and water delivery systems, so, they install intermediate firewalls, sophisticated security information and event management (SIEM) software and other tools to monitor the issues.
I now refer to IoT as SCADA 2.0. Why not? If IoT is best explained as adding IP addresses to any device, I would image that we should consider IoT an evolutionary extension, really, of what ICS systems have been doing for some time, now.
A lot of folks have started using the term operational technology (OT) as the master concept that contains ICS/SCADA and IoT devices. Yes, operational technology folks started thinking in terms of how to manage dams, pipelines and power grids. But, many of the same principles apply. I would imagine that moving forward, IoT will be discussed as a subset of OT.
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