VIEWPOINT
THE RISE OF MACHINES MICHAEL BYRNES, DIRECTOR – SOLUTIONS ENGINEERING, IMEA, BEYONDTRUST, ON THE FIVE MANAGEMENT ‘MUSTS’ OF M2M IDENTITY SECURITY
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arly adoption of new technologies is something of a regional tradition, especially among the Arab Gulf states. Lately, 5G — and its propensity to support a slew of exciting new use cases for the Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine-toMachine (M2M) — has become a hot topic. GSMA Intelligence predicts that the GCC will lead growth in 5G across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in the coming years. By 2025, its nations will be home to 20 million of MENA’s 50 million connections, with 16% of all mobile connections in the Gulf being 5G, ahead of the global average of 15%.
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CXO INSIGHT ME
OCTOBER 2021
Major telecoms providers such as Zain, Etisalat, STC and du already have IoT and M2M platform offerings, and IoT revenue is set to more than double in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) by 2023, according to one estimate from GlobalData — another strong indicator that an M2M revolution will soon be upon us. As the Gulf’s economic visions continue to gather steam, vast smart city projects like Saudi Arabia’s The Line and NEOM will rely heavily upon IoT and M2M communications. But what of the security of these projects? One report found that the UAE alone is hit by a daily average of 304 attacks on IoT infrastructure. To ensure the
region’s smart city dreams do not become nightmares, we must address the security of the apps, bots, servers, desktops, websites, containers, service accounts, and other IoT elements that could potentially be the source of our undoing. A way forward All these machine elements must identify themselves to others, and while we spend a lot of time talking about human identity management, we must never forget that our machines can also be weak links. Whether we use hardware-specific data to authenticate machines and processes, or digital certificates, reserved IP addresses, or
