8CIOReview | | NOVEMBER 2022IN MY OPINIONINDUSTRY COLLABORATION IS ESSENTIAL TO SECURE OUR INCREASINGLYCONNECTED WORLD By Michael Regelski, SVP and Chief Technology Officer, Eaton's Electrical BusinessOur world continues to become more connected and electrified. In the next five years, analysts like IDC expect 41.6 billion connected devices will generate 79.4 zettabytes of data that will need to be maintained and processed. At the same time, our world is becoming increasingly electrified with the digitalization of building and transportation systems steadily increasing. An increasingly connected and electrified world needs trusted environments. Yet, a system is only as secure as its weakest link. Supporting secure connectivity is the most important first step in our industry's ongoing marathon to harness the full potential of the IIoT. With 95 percent of CIOs expecting cybersecurity threats to increase and impact their organizations, the need for partnerships across industries and communities to innovate and build safer and more secure technologies is essential.Device manufacturers have a critical responsibility to ensure all product development follows a proactive and consistent enterprise-wide approach to cybersecurity. Only by adopting a secure by design methodology can we provide customers with confidence that their connected solutions meet rigorous standards to operate securely worldwide. To achieve this, cybersecurity risks should be managed through a Secure Development Lifecycle with protocols in place for threat modeling, requirements analysis, implementation, verification, and ongoing maintenance to manage risk.Additionally, companies should take inventory of everything connected to their networks and employ a zero-trust model.The bottom line is that cybersecurity is a must-have for product development, much like safety and quality. This means strict procedures and cybersecurity protocols need to be integrated at every phase of product development that involve people, processes and technologies.Unifying global cybersecurity standards for connected productsAs more manufacturers and industries build and deploy IIoT devices, the security and safety of systems providing essential operations become more important and more difficult to manage. These complexities are due, in part, to a lack of a global, universally accepted cybersecurity standard and conformance assessment scheme designed to validate connected products.The idea is to make sure all the components within a power system meet the same high cybersecurity standards. The economic challenges to safeguarding IIoT ecosystems spawn from the complex manufacturing supply chain and the difficulty of assigning clear liabilities to manufacturers and system integrators for any vulnerabilities introduced. Most products and systems assemblies consist of components from different suppliers. Where should the element of trust begin and end if there is no global conformity assessment scheme to ensure that products and systems are designed to be compliant Michael Regelski
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