Securing the Smart Devices that Power Asia Pacific’s Smart Cities

The Asia Pacific (APAC) region is at the frontline of IoT adoption with IoT spending in the region expected to reach $437B by 2025. This growth is driven by governments and private organizations investing heavily in digital transformation projects like Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative.

IoT devices are a key pillar of digital transformation powering a wide range of use cases from sensors monitoring smart city applications to autonomous robots in industrial environments. However, these smart devices are not designed with security in mind making them easy targets for threat actors. The inherent security vulnerabilities combined with the rapid proliferation of IoT devices multiplies the organization's security risk. So, along with the massive investment in digital transformation comes an increased need to ensure the security of the devices and technologies enabling it.

The Singapore government has been proactive in recognizing this need. It has established standards and published practical guidelines for IoT security (TR 64: 2018: “Guidelines for IoT security for smart nation” and Internet of Things (IoT) Cyber Security Guide). These guidelines are intended to serve as a blueprint for enterprise users and vendors to secure IoT devices.

Some of the key security measures outlined in the IoT Cyber Security guide include:

• Enforcing proper access controls for IoT devices (Section 6.4.1)
• Segmenting IoT and enterprise networks (Section 7.3.1)
• Establishing proper device management (Section 7.4.1)
• Conducting periodic vulnerability assessments on connected devices (Section 7.5.2)

A prerequisite to effectively applying these security measures is having visibility into and an understanding of the identity and behavior of all network-connected devices. However, most IoT security solutions limit their visibility to manually updated databases of known devices and hence cannot accurately identify and protect against the risk posed by unknown and unmanaged IoT devices. Our Unit 42 IoT Threat Report found that 30% of all devices on an organization’s network are IoT devices. This is a large attack surface that enterprises are finding challenging to secure.

Palo Alto Networks IoT Security overcomes this visibility challenge by using Machine Learning (ML) and crowdsourced telemetry data to accurately identify, classify and profile all IoT, IoMT and OT devices. It is the industry’s smartest IoT security solution delivering ML-powered visibility, prevention, and zero-trust enforcement for IoT devices in a single platform.

IoT Security in Singapore

Digital transformation is fueling IoT adoption in the Asia Pacific region and making organizations increasingly reliant on these devices for critical business operations. As a result, we’re seeing demand from customers to retain their IoT data locally.

Our new IoT Security cloud hosting location in Singapore provides customers in the APAC region local access to our cloud delivered IoT Security solution and helps ensure that their data residency preferences are met. Read more about Palo Alto Networks regional cloud locations.

Investing in local cloud infrastructures is just one of the steps we take to help our customers stay secure wherever their data resides. In addition to prioritizing customer privacy, all Palo Alto Networks solutions are built with industry-standard best practices for security and confidentiality, including application, system, network, and physical security.

To learn more, read our IoT Security Privacy Datasheet.

Palo Alto Networks IoT Security: The smartest security solution for smart devices

Palo Alto Networks IoT Security better positions our Singapore-based customers to meet government guidelines on IoT security while helping ensure that their data residency preferences are met. With IoT Security’s ML-powered device visibility and risk assessment, customers can:

• Implement context-aware segmentation of IoT devices to restrict lateral movement of threats within the network
• Enforce Zero Trust access controls for IoT devices with automated least privilege policy recommendations
• Help eliminate IoT device blind spots to ensure proper device management and maintain an accurate inventory of IoT devices
• Prioritize risk and automate compliance assessment with continuous risk assessment of all connected IoT, OT, IoMT devices

Activate cloud-delivered IoT Security on your Palo Alto Networks NGFW and start benefiting from the following outcomes:

• 90% of IoT device discovery within 48 hours
• 70X security efficacy by activating IoT Security on your current NGFWs
• 15X deployment time savings that would otherwise be spent setting up new infrastructure for securing IoT devices
• 20X time savings from IoT Security’s automated policy creation
• Reduce vulnerability discovery time from 3+ weeks to a few hours (no physical scanning and planning needed)
• 10% reduction in new device purchases by knowing accurate asset inventory

Read our e-book The Enterprise Buyer’s Guide to IoT Security to learn about how to securely reap the benefits of digital transformation by implementing IoT security best practices.