Horror Or Opportunity?

When we first started working on Bear, we spent significant time attempting to overcome one of the largest challenges facing the connected device world – how do we protect all of those open and exploited devices on the market?  Articles are constantly appearing about the billions of readily hackable IoT devices with thousands of holes in them.  Forecasts show trillions of dollars in damage from connected devices and this does not take into account the impact of GDPR regulations.

The problem with most of these older devices is that they are impossible to update or the cost to do so is more than the device is worth.  There is a very small subset of devices where this is not the case and we do have ways to get onto and manage those machines.  For the majority of these exploitable targets, however, the challenges just do not make financial sense to overcome.

For IoT customers, this is a nightmare but for IoT producers, this is a massive opportunity.

Doing It Right

Now walking into a CIO’s or CSO’s office and saying “I have a secure version of Devices X, Y and Z” will definitely peak interest but might not perhaps be sufficient.  While these executives are fully aware of their issues, they are also getting smarter about “security”.  What more and more customers demand is future-proofing their devices and not only protecting against attacks occurring today but also cyberactivity occurring in the future.

New IoT devices are ideal for this scenario with new levels of processor speed and memory constantly coming out.  Policy-based, adaptable technology like Bear is perfect to fulfill the critical future-proofing requirement.  For IoT providers, there is now a new race to provide highly secure, adaptable devices that still fulfill the current and new customer business demands.  This combination of business and security demands – even if a currently deployed device could handle the security side – will force companies to purchase new connected devices.  The choice for them will be simple – the first to market with the right type of secure device wins.

Are you even in the running at this point?