Prior to Parks Associates’ 14th-annual CONNECTIONS™ Europe: Strategies for Security and Smart Home, Steve Oetegenn, Chief Operating Officer, Verimatrix gave his insights on some of the biggest challenges releasing new smart home products and services in Europe with the firm's analyst team.
Steve will participate on the expert panel Providing Data Security and Privacy Protection to Consumers at Home on Tuesday, 19 November at 15:15. Panelists who will join him on this session include:
What are the biggest challenges rolling out new smart home products and services in Europe?
Gaining trust from consumers is a significant challenge for the adoption of smart home products. Increased awareness on the importance of data privacy is largely coming from two main market forces. First, consumers are better understanding the impact of sharing their data with different entities by just reading news headlines – major data breaches and dubious data privacy practices from social media and apps for instance.
Second, there continues to be significant growth in data privacy legislation and mandates across the globe. Service providers need to ensure they have appropriate controls in place that will help earn trust from their subscribers on how PII (personally identifiable information) and behavior data is obtained and used.
In fact, according to a recent Parks Associates report, Consumer Snapshot: UK and US Smart Home Trends, nearly one quarter of consumers list privacy concerns for the reason they have not purchased a smart home device.
The good news is that innovation in security solutions is keeping pace with ever evolving threats. Companies like Verimatrix are continuously educating customers and the market about vulnerabilities they might not know exist. We’ll be talking about these threats and how to address them in our CONNECTIONS panel,“Providing Data Security and Privacy Protection to Consumers at Home.”
One area to highlight is the applications that serve as gateways to a service that is in the cloud. Cybercriminals are well resourced, which means they are well equipped to exploit the vulnerabilities guaranteed to be found in most apps. With millions of lines of code in an app, there are going to be bugs. It is simply not going to be possible to find and remove every single bug and vulnerability.
We’ll share the different types of code protection solutions that are available to protect service providers and consumers from different types of attacks.
