Comm. Smart Cities and IoT supplement Smart Cities and IoT | Seite 31

Smart public sector

Security of national infrastructure is a top priority
GCC governments are urged to secure critical national infrastructure in the face of high risk of more sophisticated cyberattacks in the emerging Internet of Things era, industry experts
advise.
As the IoT era advances, with IBM predicting 30 billion autonomously connected things by 2020, the field of operational
technology - industrial automation and control systems including power plants, transporting oil and gas, and manufacturing
– is becoming increasing connected to networks.
At the same time, connected IT, management systems,
and control areas are facing a sharp rise in the number, scale,
and sophistication of cyberattacks, according to research firm
Gartner. In particular, manufacturing and energy/utilities were
two of the top five most-targeted verticals globally in 2014,
seeing a combined 23 per cent of all cybersecurity incidents,
according to a recent report by IBM.
Globally, there were more than 81 million security events in
2014, including more than 12,000 malicious security attacks,
and more than 100 security incidents that were investigated
in-depth, according to a report by IBM. Unauthorised access,
sustained probes and scans, and malicious code were among
the most common attacks.
Similarly, 29 per cent of worldwide infrastructure and government organisations were targeted at least once in 2014, in
particular the infrastructure and public administration fields,
according to a report by Symantec.

MEA ideally placed to advance digital uptake
The Middle East is ideally-placed to advance digital businesses
and society, as total Internet users in the region including Africa will
grow 1.6-fold to 425 million by 2019, or 27 per cent of the population,
thanks to growing demand for mobile devices, video, and social
networking, according to the 10th annual Cisco Visual Networking
Index (VNI) Forecast 2015.
By 2019 there will be nearly 3.9 billion global Internet users (more
than 51 per cent of the world’s population), up from 2.8 billion in
2014.
In Middle East and Africa, IP traffic will grow six-fold by 2019, a
compound annual growth rate of 44 per cent. Factors expected to
drive traffic growth include global increases in Internet users, personal devices and machine-to-machine (M2M) connections, faster

broadband speeds, and the adoption of advanced video services.
Social networking will be the most highly-penetrated residential
Internet service in the Middle East and Africa, with 176 million users,
or used by 81 per cent of total residential Internet users.
The report forecasts that globally, The Internet of Everything
(IoE) trend is showing tangible growth as M2M connections will
more than triple over the next five years (growing to 10.5 billion by
2019). There will be significant IoE adoption across many business
verticals (agriculture, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and transportation) as well as connected home deployments (video security,
smart meters, lighting/temperature control). The connected health
consumer segment is forecast to have the fastest M2M connections growth at 8.6-fold (54 per cent CAGR) from 2014 to 2019.
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