How would Smart IoT shape our lives in the future?

The concept of ‘connectivity’ is going beyond laptops and smartphones as we see it moving towards smart cities, smart homes, smart retail, smart farming, connected cars, connected wearable devices and connected healthcare. In short a connected life. The Internet of Things is a popular terminology these days, but unlike many technological fads, which have come and gone in the last years, the Internet of Things proves to be an important trend, which is having long lasting effects on the society. The term “Internet of Things” itself is used to mean a variety of ideas. The IoT cloud platform is primarily designed to store and process IoT data and forms the core of all IoT devices and IoT solution. The platform is built in a way that it enables taking in a huge amount of data generated by sensors, websites, applications and initiate actions for real-time responses and analytics.

For example, Smart Refrigerators can automatically order the run out items, similarly when you use Smart Locks, you do not need to have multiple keys for them, and you can unlock them by using smart phones. The platform can provide businesses with an extensive and integrated perspective of customers, without needing much technical expertise of a data analyst. The platform can intake lot of events each day and users can define rules that state events to act on and what actions to take. The demand for cloud enabled IoT services and solutions is rapidly increasing. A report by Zinnov Zones says India has about 43 per cent or $1.5 billion of the global $3.5 billion IoT market. Experts predicts that Indian IoT market will grow from $1.5 billion today to more than $9 billion by 2020 with over 2.7 billion connected devices and growing. Another Gartner report predicts, by ‘2020 the number of connected devices across all technologies will reach to about 20.6 billion’.

The real world IoT-Cloud platform application:

Smart Home Automation

How would you feel if you could switch off lights after you left home/office or switch the AC on before reaching home? With IoT, taking shape there is introduction of a world where all the smart devices can be in constant connection with each other and are monitored by users remotely via voice commands or by a simple click. With the rapid growth of IoT, it is predicted Smart Homes will be as common as smart phones. It has also been predicted by Gil Press that more than two thirds of consumers plan to buy connected technology for their homes by 2019.

Smart Wearable Technology

A detailed report by TechRepublic says in 2016, wearables were sold at a rate of 38 million and a large portion of them was fitness trackers and smart watches. These two classifications will make up a joint income of $4.9 billion. Wearable devices are installed with sensors and software is which collect data and information about the users. This data is later pre-processed to extract essential insights about the user. The pre-requisite from IoT technology for wearable applications is to be highly energy efficient, low power and small sized. The productivity of data processing achieved by various smart wrist wear, hearable, and smart glasses is getting closer to where wearables will bring exceptional value to our lives.

Connected Vehicles

Gartner predicts that about 250,000,000 connected cars will be out on the roads by 2020. So, what really are connected cars? IoT engineers have come up with an industry solution for connected automobiles that gathers, analyzes, stores and takes action on vehicle sensor data. A connected vehicle is one, which is able to improve and analyze its own operation, maintenance as well as comfort of passengers using onboard sensors and internet connectivity. IoT for automobiles is a vehicle-to-cloud offering that enables awareness of the environment even beyond the vehicles and helps use information to establish a relationship with the driver as well.

Industrial Internet

The IIoT (Industrial IoT) enables industrial engineering with sensors, software and big data analytics to build intelligent equipment. Smart machines are precise and consistent than humans in communicating data. In addition, this analytics on the generated data can help companies pick inabilities and problems fast. In the meanwhile, did you know that about 5.4 million IoT devices would be used on oil extraction sites by 2020 to provide environmental metrics about extraction sites?

Smart Cities

IoT has the potential of solving major problems faced by the people living in cities like pollution, traffic congestion and shortage of energy supplies etc. IoT will empower cities to leverage their network to offer advanced smart city applications for citizens, new eco-sustainability initiatives and create first-hand opportunities for enterprise development.

IoT in Agriculture

To help increase farm performance, IoT technology providers continue to develop IoT cloud based platforms that can sense, process and communicate precisely measured environmental data. Farms are becoming more connected as farmers realize the potential of IoT in helping them reduce cost while achieving improved results.

Smart Retail

IoT Smart Retail enables stores to revolutionize customer service while saving time and money, while simultaneously providing the consumer with a seamless shopping experience. By installing this system, retailers are also able to recapture investment dollars while surpassing expectations for tech-savvy consumers. Some of the components included in Smart Retail are Power shelf, Beacons and Digital Price Tags.

IoT for Healthcare

Research says IoT in healthcare will be enormous in coming years. It is aimed at enabling people to live healthier life by wearing connected devices. For example, through IoT, doctors can use GPS services and be prepared for treating patients being brought to the hospital in emergency cases.

IoT in Telecom Industry

Global telecom operators now use IoT enabled digital platforms that are a combination of connectivity, analysis, security, mobile and cloud to support businesses. This is helping them reduce operating costs while enabling end-users to consume technology in a business-focused manner saving time and money.

Cloud Computing Trends That Will Amaze You in 2019

Initially, cloud computing was just a tool to facilitate smooth computing experiences. With time, it has evolved to be a scalable service essential for a modern firm. It has turned out to be a buzz offering a lot of practical value. Cloud Computing has changed the way the business environment operates. The enterprises are striving hard to provide cheap, advanced and secure services to grow themselves in this competing world. Today, the cloud has come a long way and has been widely acknowledged by analysts and enterprises as the driving force to alter the IT landscape.

In the era of cloud computing buying servers, updating applications or operating systems or disposing of hardware becomes outdated. The world of internet is sure to suffer without a cloud. According to a report, industries run 79% of their workloads in the cloud. Companies leveraging the emerging trends in cloud computing are expected to grow at a faster rate.

Here are a few emerging cloud technology trends to watch in 2019.

1. Hybrid Cloud Solution

Hybrid cloud is likely to become the dominant business model in future since it enables a modernised infrastructure with two or more delivery models. Hybrid cloud environment connects a mix of public cloud, private cloud and on-premises infrastructure evolving to suit the unique needs of an organisation.

Cloud bursting is the primary reason for its rising demand. Hybrid cloud allows the enterprises to use unlimited resources to process the fluctuating workloads. To balance the organisations demand with supply, it offers close monitoring of the used resources.

The hybrid cloud solution is more popular among medical organisations to keep full control over sensitive data. It enables organisations to protect their most confidential data on their terms. In other words, Organizations themselves decide the data storage and conditions to secure the data.

2. Artificial Intelligence Platform

Artificial Intelligence is expected to aid the world mainly in providing intelligent business functionalities in future. The amalgamation of both artificial intelligence and cloud computing is “The Intelligent Cloud”. It is capable of processing big data with greater efficiency and speed.
The two critical pillars of AI are data and compute. Artificial intelligence has automated businesses with robotic process automation. It automates human tasks in organisations and used for hiring employees for a job. It is increasingly adopted in industries to reduce human workloads.

Hardware optimisation is the primary reason behind its rapid adoption. AI- optimised silicon chips can be inserted in any device to carry AI-oriented tasks.

3. Serverless Computing

Server less architecture is event-driven. In other words, for each request, a state is generated, and once the architecture serves the application, a state is destroyed. Server less computing referred to as Functions as a Service (FaaS). Since the Server less functions are accessed as private APIs, you need to set an API Gateway.

The industries are leveraging Server less computing to support a wide variety of dynamically changing needs including IoT, mobile applications and web-based applications.
This event-based programming spins up to complete user request and spins down once the task accomplished. It runs typically for a few seconds or milliseconds at a time thus, reducing the cost.

4. Edge Computing

Edge computing is shifting the computing functions close to the source - edge of the network. It dramatically reduces the complexity of interconnected systems making it much easier to gather and analyse data in real time. It has a distributed and open-ended architecture that decentralises the processing load.

Edge computing enables industrial equipment to make autonomous decisions without human intervention. It is the building block for smart factories equipped with temperature, motion and climate sensors capable of controlling light, cooling and other environmental factors. This will result in efficient use of power.

5. Backup and Disaster Recovery

The increasing usage of data is driving the adoption of backup and disaster recovery software among organisations. The thought that hardware failure can result in companies compromising its confidential data leads to the rise of disaster recovery software in the market. Data backup can’t be considered as a “set and forget” solution. It requires regular maintenance and testing to ensure an appropriate facility and easily accessible to the company.


The customers enjoy a better business continuity plan since a cloud disaster recovery plan is automated and recovers the files in seconds. The pay-per-consume feature makes it more popular among enterprises with less budget.

6. Cloud Security

Cloud computing security is a set of policies, controls, technologies and procedures working together to protect cloud-based systems, data and infrastructure. The delivery of cloud security depends on individual cloud provider or cloud security options in place.

Cloud security is mainly responsible for securing the data and fighting against hackers. Cloud backup ensures your data is protected from external threats without a need to have an antivirus plan.

The security layer in cloud consists of network security, physical security, measuring endpoint security and communication encryption. The traffic moves to and from the cloud through public channels. The encryption like SSL is vital to maintaining the integrity of data. Carefully inspect the data movement and implement the possible checks.

Final Thoughts

Cloud computing growth continues to accelerate with the technological innovations and rising trends. It is capable of providing better security, storage and helps in better decision making. The trends in cloud computing are sure to automate the businesses thus reducing the machine complexity and labour. The companies are leveraging these cloud-computing trends to stay ahead of the competition.

Safeguarding your Organization from Internal Threats

Just a quick recap from my previous blog where we focused majorly on How crucial data is and what’s even more important is its security. We also saw some standard practices for ensuring Data Security.

1. Disk Encryption- Converting data into a form that cannot be easily interpreted without a key that makes it legible.

2. Backups- Creating multiple copies of data at regular interval so it can be recovered if the original copy is lost.

3. Data Masking- Masking certain areas of data so sensitive information can be protected from unauthorized access.

4. Data Erasure- Ensuring data no longer in use is completely removed and cannot be recovered by unauthorized people.

Threats are not always bound by external sources; we need to focus on Insider Threats as well which now a days are posing more serious risks to any organization. We do have lots of security measures inside our perimeter but is it not enough? Speaking of an organization like ESDS, need to protect its integrity from our staff, vendors, customers who have Co-located their servers, Contractors, etc. The in-depth knowledge of our Network Layout, Connectivity, Policies, Processes, Business practices completely lie in the hands of our staff members.

One interesting fact about security which I came across while browsing the security zone website is maximum data breaches occur due to Internal Attackers.

The study also revealed, Organization that incurred serious loss and negative financial impact was of major share of 68%.

Most of the Internal Threats can be prevented rather it is manageable to prevent by giving proper Trainings to the employees. What an organization needs are a clearly drafted and defined policy framework that is implemented across the complete organization and monitored regularly by the Security Teams. Following are some of the steps which will enable an organization in prevention against internal threats.

1) First Security Policy

Your ISMS 27001 should include the Information transfer process. How is the data flow for Internal Teams? Similarly, while sending data outside your organization, it should be sent through secure network.

Organization Chart is another important aspect. Hierarchy should be followed in-case of any incident. Specify in your Security policy who is allowed to access which data. Even with whom the employees are allowed to share the data. Inform the consequences if any data is mishandled.

2) Educate your employees

Every department of your organization has some localized data within the department. This data might be of high or low importance. It may relate to Marketing, Sales or Personal Information of any customer. To secure this data from your employees, they need to undergo security training sessions. The best way to reduce risk from Internal Threats is to provide High end security training; explaining the importance of data and what will be the consequences if they fail to follow the security standards. Make the training interactive with some security related games. We do not say that employees will do any malicious incident but at least if they see, they may recognize it and will raise a red flag to their seniors.

3) Classify your Data

Data is classified into 3 main categories: Restricted, Private and Public data. This classification is mandatory in every organization and for every process. It should be included in your Security Policy. This helps the security team to easily rectify the data and its severity. Access to the classified data will be based on the designation of employees.

4) Physical Security

Every valuable computer must be highly secure. Only the ones who are handling the data must have the access. Use of CCTV to monitor the sensitive areas. Dual Factor authentication using smart cards or pins must be implemented in Secure zones like Data Center, Stores, Legal etc. Even consider biometric authentication for all your employees. Use of USBs must be restricted for the employees unless it is necessary. It should get scanned from IT team before using.

5) New Hires Screening

One way where you can minimize the risk is during the employment process. The role of HR begins while hiring a new candidate. A thorough background check is necessary before the employee gets on-board. HR needs to perform checks not only at the professional level but also a complete family background check if necessary. For an organization security of data is the main concern. After onboarding the employee should undergo training on Security related to the organization. Not only this, when any employee leaves the organization, HR needs to revoke all its access and make sure before being relieved the employee has submitted all the data which he was holding in his possession.

6) Strong Authentication

A strong password policy should be followed. The password should change on biweekly basis to prevent any kind of loss. Every system, servers, and the storage must be in Dual Authentication mode.

7) Monitor for “Abnormal” Behavior

Try to install right software and devices with proper access control. You need to use granular access control to monitor all the activities of the systems. Unauthorized users must be blocked from logging into the sytem. Track the behavior and if you find any abnormal action track the behavior and raise the red flag for further investigation and any Legal implications.

For investing on security we always look for reliable service provider. If you want more details on External and Internal Threats and about securing your organization, you have come to the right blog!

Request you to visit https://www.esds.co.in/soc-as-a-service for our offerings and experience of (Security Operation Center) SOC as a Service.