The Internet of Things concept is quickly beginning to take hold in the physical security industry. One trend that is beginning to rapidly take hold across the technology landscape is the concept of what has been dubbed as the “Internet of Things” or IoT for short, which is essentially the proliferation of web-enabled devices throughout all industries. In fact, Cisco, which was one of the pioneers behind the IoT phenomenon, predicts that by 2020, there will be somewhere between 20 to 50 billion connected devices in use around the world.

If Cisco’s predictions come to fruition, it raises several important questions for the security industry.

First, how can organizations using these connected devices ensure that they are not infiltrated by hackers? And secondly, how will the IoT impact the development of security technologies and what benefits will they be able to provide users over the current generation of surveillance, access control, intrusion detection devices, and more that are already in use?

“This is going to produce a massive amount of data and a massive amount of information,” said Geetha Dabir, vice president and general manager for IoT applications at Cisco.

“And this adds complexity to the (network) architecture, as well as the way we view how we do things at Cisco.” Given some of the vulnerabilities of connected devices that have come to light, especially in the healthcare sector where it was recently […]