Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Joe Lea, VP of Product at Armis (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You’ve done a nice job of defining the problem. What is viable architecturally given the fact that there are devices everywhere and the level of connectivity via devices is unbelievably expensive at the moment and increasingly more so?

Joe Lea: That viability problem that you mentioned is exactly the reason why I left Tanium. We solved a lot of the traditional endpoint problems that have plagued the industry there. But the approach there is to require an agent to be installed on an endpoint.That works when you’re talking about laptops, desktops, and servers but it doesn’t work when you’re talking about a voice over IP phone or an insulin pump within healthcare.

Similarly, the technical approaches of scanning those devices to look for vulnerabilities and to accurately identify them. That approach is not viable in these types of environments because scanning devices, which aren’t set up and designed to be scanned like that, will sometimes be interfered and tipped over and end up having the exact opposite effect.

You come in with a security solution and hope to make the environment more secure and more robust. If you take a scanning approach, the first thing you do is take those devices offline thus interrupting your factory floor or your biomedical devices and ultimately impacting profitability, patient care, and things like that. Those approaches are well recognized now as being completely inappropriate for the world of IoT.

Similarly, a lot of solutions rely on the centralization of log files and the analysis of various events on those devices. Looking at many different types of devices that are out there whether they’re printers and mundane types of conventional IP things, they aren’t producing log files that can give us clues about how they’re operating and what they’re doing. Those three approaches – agents, scanning, and the centralization of log files – are inappropriate.

Solutions and vendors who have made businesses on the backs of those types of technical approaches are now trying to extend their footprint into the world of unmanaged devices and IoT but they’re bringing that legacy approach with them. That mentality of solving the problem won’t do. We’ve seen some high profile cases of what can go wrong when you take the wrong technical approach to these environments.

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying that the constant monitoring is hugely taxing on the infrastructure. How’d you go around it without monitoring constantly?

Joe Lea: Constant monitoring these devices with the legacy of approaches taxes the device but they’re in another approach. This is where Armis came in. Why is it so important that we unshackle ourselves from the traditional technical approaches in the industry and think about the problem as a fresh problem?

We need to go back to the drawing board as Armis has done and reimagine ways in which we can bring that level of continuous monitoring and security to these devices without interfering with them. It probably helps if I introduce Armis a little bit more.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Joe Lea, VP of Product at Armis
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