If you don't know what's on your IoT network, you don't know what to protect -- or protect from. These tools provide visibility into your network so you can be safe with (and from) what you see.
It's hard to protect what you don't know you have. Put another way, it's those "unknown unknowns" that tend to get you. And the number of unknown unknowns is increasing because of the rapid rise in enterprise IoT devices and the incredibly disruptive rise of the "
shadow IoT" that parallels the shadow IT seen in the traditional IT space. That's why one of the words most commonly heard at security conferences is "visibility," and why getting a handle on what's actually attached to the network is a critical step in any security plan.
It's also why there are so many new tools for getting that critical visibility, all looking at the computing environment from different vantage points.
Visibility for security means knowing all of the devices attached to the network, all the software running on those devices, which cloud services they might be using, and more. Traditional instruments of network visibility - like the tap or span port - might not be enough for IoT.
