Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Andrew McLennan, President, North America of Inside Secure (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I have a follow-up question. If you look at the space of security in the context of payments, both mobile payments and desktop payments, who are the major security vendors and what are the differences in the key approaches? You have, of course,  just described your approaches. What are the key approaches in the industry and why is one better than the other?

Andre McLennan: There are three basic approaches and a variety of vendors across the space. You can use hardware to secure where you host Java code. All the processing is done in the hardware, and you’ve the most secure processing environment. But I think we’re all aware now that hardware is never 100% secure. It’s a great paradigm for payment, but the problem is it requires the maker of the payment application to understand what the hardware is. This is where you see the likes of Apple Pay come in, because they understand what their hardware is.  They can devise a payment experience knowing exactly what the hardware platform is. Of course, what that means is if the hardware is compromised, everyone loses. Every single person’s security is compromised. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Andrew McLennan, President, North America of Inside Secure (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take a few examples. Let’s take maybe one example from the chip side and one example from the credit card side and talk us through how exactly this works.

Andrew McLennan: I’m the software specialist, so I can give you more detail on the software side and less detail on the hardware side. I’m going to take the use case for host card emulation. In October 2013, Google removed the need for radio device to have to talk directly with a hardware element. Before Google did this, the SIM card was holding a secure element, which is basically a cryptography engine and hardware. If you want to make a mobile payment, the mobile network operators are in control of the SIM; therefore, you had to work through them. The cost of mobile network operators was demanding at that point. Android Google topped the market by allowing anyone to make a payment without passing through the SIM. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Andrew McLennan, President, North America of Inside Secure (Part 1)

I am still digging into the issue of vastly enhanced exposure to cyber security threats with the advent of Internet of Things. Here we discuss that and other issues.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Inside Secure.

Andrew McLennan: I currently serve as the President of US for Inside Secure. Inside Secure is a public company headquartered in France. We basically focus very strongly on embedded security and in particular, security elements and software security. My own particular expertise is in the area of software security, which is quite hot in the payments industry and finance in general.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a bit about the broader trends in your space and how does what you are doing align with those trends? >>>

What Should SAP Acquire Next?

According to a recent cloud computing report published by Bessemer Venture Partners, the global cloud computing market is projected to grow 23% annually over the period 2014 through 2018 and reach $127.5 billion by the year 2018. The report reveals that enterprise spending on SaaS applications is currently at nearly 30% of all application spending. Technology companies that have embraced cloud are already seeing strong results.

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Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: David Parker, Global Vice President, SAP (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How pervasive would you say is the adoption of Internet of Things? Do you have sensors’ use cases in each of these segments that you brought up? It sounds like manufacturing and industrial automation is one of the early adopters. Is that 100% penetrated? What are we talking here?

David Parker: The irony is that a lot of these industrial firms have had sensors on a lot of their machines for a number of years. They capture the data in batch mode and are not doing much with that data. When a machine fails, I know that it failed because it failed. I don’t need to get a report on it. I would categorize it as much as around 55% of manufacturing firms are already in that state. They’re already connected. They’re already acquiring data but don’t do much with it. The technology now has moved on in terms of capturing it real time and processing it either on the edge or at a core data center, or in the cloud.

As much as 40% of that 55% is now about collectively, in real time, looking at that data and doing some predictive analysis on that data. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: David Parker, Global Vice President, SAP (Part 4)

David Parker: Number two is, these industries like manufacturing, CPG, automotive, mining, oil & gas are the primary industries that we’re seeing a lot of traction from our customers across the globe, irrespective of the initiative that’s coming out of Germany. The main reason for that is that they envision that there must be a new commercial revenue opportunity by taking some of the consumer market. What they mean by that is that everybody has some kind of a mobile device. You know the stats.

The executives at these organizations such as Siemens, Honeywell, GE are looking at this market and saying, “How do we capture more consumer share? How can we improve our products and services by enriching the data that we already have with data that we don’t have currently >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: David Parker, Global Vice President, SAP (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I have a specific question on what is the state of the union that you are seeing in your customer base with SAP. Are there large customers who are connecting up through these RFID/sensor devices with huge numbers of assets? If so, then which industry sectors are they in and, if you are authorized to give some names of customers who are going for big deployment, who are they?

I’ll give you the context of where I’m coming from. The main push back that I hear in the industry is, exposing so many assets to network devices means that there are surface areas that are being opened up to cyber security problems and breaches. If you look at retail for instance, if every item has an RFID device, then the surface area that is exposed to cyber threats is much higher. Based on my earlier conversations, there’s actually quite a bit of resistance in large customers to roll out Internet of Things. My question to you is what are you seeing from SAP’s vantage point?
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Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: David Parker, Global Vice President, SAP (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What has that got to do with IoT?

David Parker: When you look at IoT, my view of IoT is just another data artifact. Unfortunately, the market does get hung up on terminologies. It was Big Data a couple of years ago. Before that, you had enterprise service architectures. There’s always a terminology. The term that’s right right now is Internet of Things.

Sramana Mitra: That’s not true. Big Data and Internet of Things are not the same. They may be interrelated. Big Data works from data and data can be generated from a lot of things. It doesn’t have to be generated from Internet of Things.

David Parker: This is the point. I’m talking the hype. The hype was that Big Data came along – big volumes of data, velocity of data, variety of data. After that, IoT became a component of that as it relates to the thing itself. It started with machine to machine, which has been in the industry for many, many years. >>>