Using Metrics in the Industrial IoT Value Chain to Drive Trustworthiness
The high level assessment of the expected
consequences of any event should also take
into account a range of extenuating and/or
mitigating factors that may be relevant to
the specific trustworthiness event in
question. Such factors include:
trustworthiness
measures
can
also
themselves generate increased value for a
business. This can happen through a number
of mechanisms, including:
Scale of Breach – Is the breach very
limited in scale, compared to the
overall solution or is it complete and
fundamental?
Reversibility – Can the breach be
reversed with a definite cost or will it
become an ongoing and open-ended
exposure?
Downstream Impacts – Is there
potential for a trustworthiness event
to impact other IIoT solutions (or real
world events) that are potentially
influenced by any outputs of the IIoT
system in question?
Potential Criticality – Do specific
trustworthiness events potentially
have different levels of impact for
different user groups? 4
Accordingly, to appropriately manage
trustworthiness within a business it is also
necessary to identify how any real options
for enhancing trustworthiness might
potentially result in an opportunity to
enhance value.
Efforts should also be made to estimate the
financial impact of any potential
trustworthiness breach. The expected
business risk associated with any specific
trustworthiness event is simply a product of
the probability of that event and the impact
of that event. So these are the two critical
inputs to any approach to optimizing
trustworthiness within an IIoT system.
It should also be noted that trustworthiness
is an evolving concept and trustworthiness
measures that are appropriate for the
overall context of any IIoT system at any one
time may not be suitable at some future
time. Figure 7 illustrates a sequence of
events whe reby the required level of
trustworthiness increases twice during the
‘operate/maintain’ phase of an IIoT solution
(potentially due to a change in relevant
Investment in trustworthiness is not,
however,
a
one-sided
argument:
4
Brand impact – companies can seek to
differentiate on the basis of
trustworthiness
and
become
recognized as ‘more trustworthy’ than
competitors.
Increased revenues – potentially
products and services that are
underpinned by higher levels of IIoT
trustworthiness (or QoS) can be sold
for higher unit revenues.
Market access – potentially new
markets for products and services may
become addressable if a company
maintains
higher
levels
of
trustworthiness.
For instance information about use of drugs by a rock star is a non-story, whereas for a politician it could be career ending.
September 2018
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