Chris Penrose: For IoT, ‘security is paramount.’
In an interview with RCR Wireless News during Mobile World Congress 2017, AT&T SVP of IoT Chris Penrose highlighted the fundamental importance of securing the fast-growing internet of things.
“Security is paramount. It’s the No. 1 thing people are concerned about when they’re thinking about doing IoT,” Penrose said. “We take a multilayer approach to security. We really kind of look at it at the device layer – what do we need to be doing to the device itself to secure that device. Then we look at the network layer – what do we need to be doing when data is in transit, then we look at it at the application layer. What’s unique also for AT&T is we have these networks that go all over the world and we can actually see a lot of the bad actors and threats happening before it might even be realized on the other end. Our ability to bring threat detection and to potentially alert you to a threat that we’re seeing or to even take action based upon the threat we’re seeing and/or protect other similarly situated customers. On top of that we’ve even introduced an IoT security consultancy practice where we will bring out security experts to look at the solution you’re looking to deploy and make sure we’ve pressure tested it end to end. It’s always going to be a continuous challenge to stay in front of it.”
Penrose further gave insight into how the IoT security issue is addressed during a typical enterprise sales cycle.
“I would say, candidly, it’s coming up with much greater frequency and much earlier in the conversations than ever before,” Penrose said. “It really is the No. 1 thing. If you polled CIOs about what’s their No. 1 concern, it is security. It’s at the forefront of the conversations. But it has been accelerated in the level of importance just because of all the stories that have been out there about things that have happened. It really is something that I would say, I feel like today it is something that everyone of these guys that is looking to do one of these solutions, now is saying that we need to be talking about security. If they’re not bringing it up, we’ll bring it up.”
