Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Andrew McLennan, President, North America of Inside Secure (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch the discussion to Internet of Things. On our blog, we have two series that are related. One is cyber security and the other is Internet of Things. One of the issues that we’ve been hearing about from various people is that there are large swaths of the Internet of Things applications that customers  are not going forward with because of security concerns. If you turn everything on a retail shelf into an Internet of Things situation, the surface area that can cause cyber security breaches goes up exponentially. Retailers are cautious about that and are afraid of that. Tell me what you are seeing in your work with Internet of Things. What is your approach with Internet of Things? How are you adding to the challenge of the Internet of Things situation?

Andrew McLennan: I’ll deal with the hardware aspect of that first, then I’ll talk somewhat on the software. What we see with Internet of Things is that people are selling the product. They don’t have a high degree of security if any at all. What we see on the hardware side is people beginning to be interested in security whether that’s putting chips into devices. Of course, the replacement in the market may be years from now. You have high profile breaches like Chrysler  and we see other cars being compromised. What we do in software is we provide the same security technology for payment to the IoT providers for the automotive manufacturers. We provide software solutions that  can be used to remediate your security problem. You can roll out a software patch to your vehicles which is far less costly than trying to replace hardware. That’s the positioning that we’re trying to sell on the software side. I do agree with you very much on the general trend. There’s a lot of fear because have been seeing a lot of high-profile breaches. That’s all it takes for people to be frightened.

Sramana Mitra: That fear is very legitimate. I was at an event and someone said, “I get into my car. The car has a lot of software and its Internet is connected. If someone breaches into my car, I could be dead.”

Andrew McLennan: Yes, that’s a very legitimate concern. It’s a numbers game at the end of the day.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Andrew McLennan, President, North America of Inside Secure
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