As much as I enjoy writing about the M2M industry, I also enjoy reading other good articles and blog posts about it just as much.  What has amazed me is how far along the industry has come, and the level of writing/knowledge used in many of these articles illustrates that growth.

5 cool things that you didn’t know M2M could do

This article does a great job to break down M2M in ways that most people can easily understand.  The article mentions that there is a low level of knowledge among the general public about M2M, and blames this on the fact that many of these solutions are deployed behind the scenes.  I honestly never thought about how M2M would be used in the Music/Entertainment space....see, you do learn something new every day!  While the other examples are not earth-shattering, as I and others have written about some of them before, they do go a long way to taking the complexity out of explaining what can be a difficult thing for many to understand.

The business benefits for machine to machine

While this article doesn’t really break new ground when explaining M2M and its benefits, it does do a good job to help people better position it to C-Level executives (read my blog series on selling M2M to C-Level execs too).  I like the example used (Brasserie Bread) as it shows an industry that has a lot of characteristics that cross over to many other markets (the real-time nature of their business, the wide-spread delivery of products and real-time alerts vs. historical data recorded).  It points out the further blurring of the lines between the terms “M2M and “Big Data”, and how the combination of the two benefit all areas of the business.

M2M and the IoT: How secure is it?

Quick, want to scare a CIO?  Tell him that all of the usage information from all of their remote assets are now pushing information across the general Internet and it is being done not using a VPN.  For many companies, this is exactly what they are doing.  This article has three sub-articles that break down the adoption rate of M2M, possible security threats and security barriers that need to be overcome.

One of the interesting aspects of security is how it talks about how early SCADA systems did not factor in security for the most part as they were not meant to have information transverse the Internet.  With the new systems all moving towards IP, and using more common operating environments like Windows or Linux, they are now much more vulnerable than before.  It also talks about how designers of security for M2M want to not duplicate some of the issues done in the initial design of the Internet.

Hackers have one thing going for them....creativity.  Think you have solved every issue?  Like the weather in many parts of the country, just wait 10 minutes for things to change.  Physical security has not been a major threat to IT systems for many years, since it is easy to secure large server rooms and there are plenty of ways to secure PCs in fixed environments.  SCADA/M2M deployments are often in the middle of nowhere, and require a different approach.  I love their line....”I can see convergence of authentication, GPS technology and M2M”.  I also never considered how companies could use Denial of Service attacks to increase the CPU usage, which would drain systems that we either battery and/or solar powered.....the same goes for how using encryption could affect battery life.  This is a well written page.

Finally, after scaring pretty much all of us about the security risks, the article finishes on what barriers there are to securing M2M as we move forward on our mass adoption curve.  One of the suggestions, which might sound crazy at first, is to not secure each and every device deployed.  Instead, one suggestion from a Verizon executive is to secure the pipe to/from the Internet.  Considering that many devices that will be M2M enabled will not have a lot of “horsepower” on them, this sounds reasonable.  Finally, it points out that we may have unknown vulnerabilities as we move further into IPv6.

Overall, this is a well done piece of writing.  It is informative without going for the “scared sell”.

Bottom Line

It is great to see that people are writing more (and better) about our beloved industry.  I suspect that this is a trend that will continue.  I look forward to providing you with some good content from my brain, as well as other information that I see out in the world.

As always, let Novotech know how we can help with your M2M needs, such as antenna selection.  You can visit our web page @ www.novotech.com.  As well, feel free to reach out to me directly ....larry(@)novotech.com.  You can also follow us on Twitter (@NovotechM2M) and you can follow me personally as well (@LBNovotechM2M).