Today, digital businesses strive to create new business models that turn stand-alone products into highly interactive and connected services. This comes with many challenges — from complicated integrations and extended deployment timelines to mitigating safety and privacy concerns. According to Forbes, an intensified focus on security measures is one of the five IoT trends to consider in 2017. Even U.S. Congress members recently crossed party lines to introduce a bipartisan bill to address IoT vulnerabilities.

While consumer IoT has slowed somewhat, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) — which connects industrial equipment in factories — is booming. Per TNW, the size and scale of IIoT will overtake the consumer market as IoT technology permeates the industrial sector. Its global growth curve is predicted at 100 billion connected devices.

The need to safeguard data between devices, sensors, and backend platforms connected within an IIoT ecosystem requires new security innovations. That’s why last month we introduced the Entrust Datacard ioTrust™ Security Solution. ioTrust™ recognizes the unique needs of IIoT environments and incorporates sound security practices.

The solution is based on enterprise-grade encryption technologies and leverages 30 years of Entrust Datacard expertise in establishing identity-based, trusted infrastructures for the world’s most secure environments. With capabilities such as identity, authentication and authorization, credential lifecycle management, and secure communications — ioTrust™ helps organizations securely connect the people, applications and devices that power the connected world. By applying digital identities managed through definable policy, ioTrust™ allows companies to do business in new ways and create the trusted products and experiences that these environments demand.

In this new blog series, we’ll explore IIoT security. More specifically, we’ll dive into what trust means to operational technologies (OT) and how to solve problems stemming from trust within the unique OT environment. We look forward to providing use cases, data, and insights across key IIoT verticals: industrial, automotive, telecom, smart cities, infrastructure, and energy and utilities. We hope you’ll join the conversation here and on Twitter via #ioTrust.