Shanghai’s metro transports three billion passengers every year, an 8.7 magnitude earthquake in Los Angeles would cause 200 billion US dollars in damage, and residents of São Paulo spend an average of 45 days in traffic jams – the trend toward urbanization can only be maintained with the support of technological advances. It is becoming a key factor to the quality of life. However, it is far from having entered most people’s consciousness, so that new thinking in IT security is necessary to promote this technological advance. In short: A smart world needs smart security.
Established in 1879, the Linde technology group employs over 60,000 people worldwide in business divisions such as Gas and Engineering.
The blueprint of the smart world reveals why this is the case. People are more mobile in the smart world, and so are goods, data, and finances. In addition, trillions of sensors will ensure that the Internet of Things experiences gigantic data growth – data that is becoming a hard currency in new business models and which is at home across the globe, thanks to blockchain technology, for example. This smart world is limitless but should not be unrestrained. The concept of network security enters a whole new dimension here. Because the network is everything, and without a network everything is nothing.
Experts from eco, the Association of the Internet Industry, together with the consultants of Arthur D. Little, examined what this means specifically in terms of volume. The sales volume of the German smart city market alone will increase from 20.4 billion euros in 2017 to 43.8 billion euros in 2022. This is an average annual growth rate of 16.5 percent. “Growth is happening across all market segments, with more than 65 percent of the total smart city market in 2017 comprising the four segments of transportation & logistics, communications services & network security, physical security, and building automation,” according to the experts.
The growing connectivity of production environments has helped make cyber security a core strategic issue for the multinational technology group.
And this “network security” has nothing to do with what IT security experts commonly mean. Example of Dubai: The metropolis of three million in the already fast-growing United Arab Emirates has ambitious smart city plans, with the goal of reducing CO2 emissions by 16 percent and car traffic by 8 percent. These measures alone require a batch of more than 150 smart city initiatives and services, from smart traffic lights to online government services. These services themselves are then integrated into an ICT platform with an open and horizontal architecture. Given the degree of interconnectedness of this digital world, it is, therefore, more than logical that new high-performance centers for network security emerge, such as Deutsche Telekom’s integrated Cyber Defense and Security Operation Center (SOC) in Bonn, Germany, one of Europe’s largest and most modern defense centers thwarting cyberattacks.
The experts of Deutsche Telekom analyze one billion security-relevant pieces of data from 3000 data sources every day, almost fully automatically. 30 companies and organizations already rely on SOC, including the Munich-based global corporation Linde (see the interview). At the new Master SOC in Bonn and affiliated locations, around 200 experts monitor the systems of Deutsche Telekom and its customers 24 hours a day, both nationally and internationally. They detect cyberattacks, analyze the attack methods, sustainably protect against attacks, and deduce forecasts of future patterns of attacks. To do so, the Deutsche Telekom experts draw on their many years of experience in combating attacks on their own infrastructure. They have already collected more than 20 million examples of attacks and used them to improve their own systems. A smart team to protect a prospering digital world.
