Monitoring IoT ecosystems

The most important challenge that architects should address in IoT is, not surprisingly, security. The security estate of IoT devices must be monitored continuously. To understand the risks better, we can have a look at top risks that are listed by OWASP, the Open Web Application Security Project. We only list the top five.

• Weak passwords
• Poorly protected network services
• Poorly secured interfaces
• lack of update mechanisms for security rules and patches
• Use of outdated components

The top risk however is the lack of device management and leaving the data transfer unmonitored. However, this starts with knowing where the devices are. But knowing where devices sit is not sufficient; we must also know what these devices are doing, what sort of data the devices collect and how they collect it. Observability is the key principle that any IoT architecture must comply with.

This is already the biggest challenge in IoT. Think of the fact that an IoT ecosystem might consist...