This chapter reveals the overview of the Internet of Things (IoT); the IoT, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID); the technology of the IoT; the IoT and security concerns; the information security aspects of the IoT; the applications of the IoT in modern health care; and the implications of the IoT in the digital age. Organizations can utilize the IoT to gain the considerable cost savings by improving asset utilization, enhancing process efficiency, and increasing productivity in global operations. However, the IoT has its own challenges, such as the privacy of personal data, the lack of compatibility, and security breach. The chapter argues that utilizing the IoT and security techniques has the potential to enhance organizational performance and meet security requirements toward threat prevention in global operations.
TopIntroduction
The Internet of Things (IoT) has been considered as one of the most promising paradigms that can allow people and objects to seamlessly interact (Zhao, Sun, & Jin, 2015). The significance of the IoT is made possible through enabling various technologies, such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs), mainly used for the sensing operations (Collotta & Pau, 2015). In the IoT, key nodes are represented by sensors, actuators, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, smart objects, and servers connected to the Internet, which have the most diverse characteristics and capabilities (Atzori, Iera, & Morabito, 2010). A combination of Internet-connected devices, smart objects, sensors, and supplementary web-based services makes the IoT practically pervasive in various industries (Shelby & Bormann, 2011). IoT offers a potential to affect the economic activity across industries, influencing their strategic decisions, their investments, and their productivity (Borgia, 2014).
The rise of the IoT has important socio-technical implications for individuals, organizations, and society (Shin, 2014). With fast development and application, the IoT brings more opportunities to business (Rong, Hu, Lin, Shi, & Guo, 2015) and is characterized by heterogeneous technologies, which concur to the provisioning of innovative services in various application domains (Sicari, Rizzardi, Grieco, & Coen-Porisini, 2015). In this perspective, the satisfaction of security and privacy requirements plays an important role (Sicari et al., 2015). Security is crucial to the success of active networking especially when the current network is characterized by a dynamic nature and increasing distribution (Al-Saadoon, 2015). Together with the conventional security solutions, there is the need to provide the built-in security in the IoT devices themselves (i.e., embedded devices) in order to pursue dynamic prevention, detection, diagnosis, isolation, and countermeasures against successful breaches (Babar, Stango, Prasad, Sen, & Prasad, 2011).
This chapter focuses on the literature review through a thorough literature consolidation of the IoT and security perspectives. The extensive literature of the IoT and security perspectives provides a contribution to practitioners and researchers by revealing the issues and trends with the IoT and security perspectives in order to enhance organizational performance and reach strategic goals in global operations.