Risks from emerging technologies: IoT/5G/edge at scale and their security implications.

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Executive Summary: The New Reality

IoT/5G/edge has become your third-largest attack surface. You're already compromised — you just don't know where yet.

Five Strategic Truths

1. The perimeter is dead. 33% of enterprise breaches now originate through IoT endpoints¹. Your 18,000 connected devices are 18,000 open doors.

2. You're blind to 40-60% of your IoT assets. Shadow deployments by well-meaning employees create unmanaged attack paths into crown jewel systems daily.

3. Operational impact now exceeds data breach costs. Manufacturing: $5.7M per incident. Healthcare: $10.3M². Financial services: $2.7M per hour of downtime.

4. Regulation is now existential. EU CRA (2026): €15M fines or 2.5% global revenue. DORA: 4-hour recovery mandate. FDA: Criminal liability for medical device failures. Miss these deadlines and lose market access.

5. Your vendors are your biggest vulnerability. February 2025: Single IoT platform compromise cascaded to 100+ enterprises. Your security is only as strong as your weakest supplier.

The Cost of Inaction

• Year 1: 67% probability of Tier 3 device enabling Tier 1 breach

• Year 2: Regulatory non-compliance bars you from EU markets

• Year 3: Insurance carriers exclude IoT incidents from coverage

Seven Non-Negotiables (Next 90 Days)

1. Stratify everything: Map all devices to three risk tiers. Tier 1 (mission-critical) gets 60% of security spend.

2. Implement Zero Trust for devices: PKI certificates, not passwords. Micro-segmentation, not VLANs.

3. Automate or drown: 18 billion events daily require ML-driven detection. Human SOCs can't scale.

4. Fix your blind spots: Deploy continuous discovery. Unknown device = immediate isolation.

5. Integrate IoT into enterprise risk: Board needs quarterly IoT KRIs. Make it visible or it won't get funded.

6. Build OT incident response: IT playbooks fail for industrial systems. Train dedicated OT response team.

7. Lock down supply chain: Vendor security assessments before contracts. SBOMs mandatory. Kill switches for vendor compromise.

Bottom Line: IoT/5G/edge security is no longer optional. It's the difference between operational resilience and existential failure. Act now or explain to your board why you didn't.

Investment required: 3-7% of IT security budget ROI: Avoiding one incident pays for five years of the program Timeline: 180 days to baseline security, 12 months to maturity

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