Only 48% of businesses have the infrastructure set up to detect whether their IoT infrastructure is open to a data breach, a report by security firm Gemalto has revealed.

Firms are now asking for the government to intervene and set better regulations around IoT security to prevent potentially damaging hacks into such devices.

In fact, 79% of the 950 decision makers the company spoke to said they think the government should play a more involved part in combating IoT-related cybercrime, whether this is creating a framework for firms to adhere to or making it clearer who is responsible for protecting IoT.

“Given the increase in the number of IoT-enabled devices, it’s extremely worrying to see that businesses still can’t detect if they have been breached,” said Jason Hart, CTO of data protection at Gemalto.

“With no consistent regulation guiding the industry, it’s no surprise the threats – and, in turn, vulnerability of businesses – are increasing. This will only continue unless governments step in now to help industry avoid losing control.”

The leading challenges businesses refer to when discussing IoT security are data privacy (38%) and the collection of large volumes of data – a problem surfaced by 34% of respondents.

However, perhaps surprisingly, Gemalto’s report revealed that only 59% of organisations are investing in IoT security, such as encrypting data sent over the network.

One of the leading technologies adopted by businesses to secure their data against criminals is the use of blockchain and adoption is up to 19% from just 9% in the last year and almost a quarter of firms are now saying they would consider using it to protect their assets.

“Businesses are clearly feeling the pressure of protecting the growing amount of data they collect and store,” Hart continued.

“But while it’s positive they are attempting to address that by investing in more security, such as blockchain, they need direct guidance to ensure they’re not leaving themselves exposed. In order to get this, businesses need to be putting more pressure on the government to act, as it is them that will be hit if they suffer a breach.”

Google has awarded IBM’s MaaS360 with Watson the accolade of the first Android Enterprise Recommended for businesses utilising both company-owned and BYOD devices.

To become a recognised partner, software must offer businesses a true enterprise-level experience, with the tools to help businesses and employees be more productive. They must utilise Android’s enterprise features and developers must work closely with Google to ensure a consistent and successful deployment for enterprise teams.

IBM’s MaaS360 with Watson offers a Unified endpoint management (UEM) platform that introduces artificial intelligence to enable endpoints and end users to interact with apps, content and data seamlessly.

It helps IT teams secure Android phones, tablets and ruggedised devices with centralised device management, whether those devices are in the office or out in the field.

“With significant Android Enterprise activations for MaaS360, we’ve prioritized not only the product roadmap to ensure our clients can adopt the Android Enterprise solution sets, but also training and enablement for the IBM sales and support organizations to best support the platform,” said John Nielsen, offering manager of MaaS360 at IBM Security.

“With the consistency that Android Enterprise provides clients across various Android manufacturers, we do not anticipate the adoption trend to slow down any time soon.”

As Android has developed, so has IBM MaaS360. Although many of the features of the platform are now offered as standard on Android, especially with the introduction of Android 9 Pie, it also tags on AI features not available from Android devices.

Features such as MaaS360 Policy Recommendation Engine forms part of the device set-up process, enabling administrators to set policies such as passcode, container and restrictions to ensure employee devices are secured. Everything can be managed through a central console, reducing IT support time.

MaaS360 Assistant uses artificial intelligence to increase employee productivity, but reduce support calls and Business Dashboards for Apps analyses apps in use by employees, ensuring the company is getting the highest ROIs from those deployed.

A startup semiconductor company has just raised a further $30 million in funding from AWS and Samsung, bringing its total funding to $50 million

Williot manufactures a battery-free Bluetooth sensor tag the size of a postage stamp which is being heralded as a low-cost, high-efficiency solution for broad IoT implementation in business.

The Bluetooth tag powers itself using scavenged energy from ambient radio frequencies and can be stuck on a variety of surfaces, somewhat like an RFID tag.

“A Wiliot chip glued to a simple antenna printed on plastic or paper can authenticate the proximity of a product by transmitting an encrypted serial number along with weight and temperature data from a device the size of a postage stamp,” the company said in a press statement issued yesterday. 

By removing the need for most of the components traditionally associated with Bluetooth, it’s possible to reduce both sale and support costs significantly, according to Wiliot. 

In the real world, the tags supposedly have many use cases from business to consumer, including real-time tracking of goods through the manufacturing process, to the warehouse and from the store to the end consumer. The tags also offer opportunities to verify the successful delivery of goods and grey market verification.

The tags can also be used to tack valuables if they are lost or stolen and even communicate with connected washing machines to ensure whites never get mixed with colours using proximity sensors on all tagged items.

“We believe that disposable electronics based on battery-free, low-cost systems are the foundation for future IoT systems. We are on the edge of dramatically changing the way products are made, how they are distributed, where and when they are sold, and how they are used and recycled,” said Tal Tamir, Wiliot CEO and co-founder.

The technology may sound similar to RFID, a technology for which Wiliot already offers products, but the tags can deliver far more features than RFID, increasing their usability. 

The tags make use of recycled radiation to power themselves and can transmit information such as location, proximity, when they are picked up, their temperature or when the product they are attached to needs to e replenished. The product has “unlimited power and lifespan, so can be embedded inside of products that were previously unconnected to the Internet of Things,” Tamir added.

ManageEngine’s OpManager has gone through a number of transformations over the past two years and the latest edition, v12.3, delivers even more new features. Its revamped web console makes problem detection and troubleshooting even easier, it has over 39,000 vendor templates for accurate device identification and virtual host support now includes Citrix XenServer.

Licensing doesn’t get any simpler: it’s based purely on monitored devices, regardless of the number of interfaces, sensors or elements each one has. The Essentials version is great value too, with prices starting at only £1,850 for a 50 device license pack.

OpManager also stands out for its advanced virtualization monitoring. A standard license includes VMware, Hyper-V and XenServer support – something many other vendors only offer as an optional, paid-for feature.

OpManager’s light touch on its host system also gets our vote. We downloaded the small 135MB executable, installed it in 15 minutes on our Windows Server 2012 R2 host and watched it load a single Windows service and default PostgreSQL database.

Discovery doesn’t take long either with the wizard-driven routine asking for IP address ranges, sets of device credentials and schedule details. Our discovery profile took 7 minutes to scan the lab network and we could see a list of all discovered devices from the Inventory tab. OpManager offers accurate identification; it correctly spotted our HPE network switches, Windows 10 desktops, Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V hosts, printers and NAS appliances.

The new console sees all menu options moved to the top with a ribbon bar providing easy access to features such as dashboards, device inventories, alarms and maps. Existing users will like the option to switch the page layout back to the previous version, which has a menu bar down the side and network summary across the top.

The enterprise dashboard provides a widget-based overview of device availability, alarms, the busiest devices and an infrastructure snapshot showing a list of device categories. The new design supports drag-and-drop customisation and although you can’t remove any widgets from the default views, you can create your own dashboards.

The heat-map widget is a must-have feature in any dashboard, as it presents a grid of coloured blocks representing each device, their status and quick links to each one. Another valuable feature is the NOC (Network Operations Center) views where you can select dashboards and present them on a big screen for your support department.

OpManager provided plenty of virtualization details with a summary dashboard, separate ones for Hyper-V, VMware and XenServer plus another showing VM sprawl. For our Hyper-V host, we viewed a page showing VMs using the most host resources with separate tables for CPU, memory, storage and network utilization.

Workflows automate responses to events or errors and associate sequences of conditions and actions. These are simple to create using the Workflow Builder, where you drag and drop conditions and actions into its central pane and apply them to selected devices.

The optional Application Performance Management (APM) add-in snaps neatly into the OpManager console and provides in-depth details on a huge range of applications, databases and cloud services. The Storage add-on is less appealing as many of the RAID, FC switch and tape library devices listed as supported are obsolete.

OpManager’s new iOS app delivers monitoring on the move. With it loaded on our iPad, we logged into the OpManager host and viewed our custom dashboards, all monitored devices, alarms and the APM module.

This latest version of OpManager delivers a wealth of new features and remedies most of its predecessor’s shortcomings. It’s swift to deploy, includes integral virtualization monitoring tools and looks great value for SMBs.