“Having embraced a bring-your-own-device strategy, organisations must now get employee devices on the enterprise network and start addressing the 21 billion IoT devices that we project will want access to the enterprise network,” Tim Zimmermann, Gartner research vice president, commented.

“Whether a video surveillance camera for a parking lot, a motion detector in a conference room or the HVAC for the entire building, the ability to identify, secure and isolate all IoT devices – and in particular ‘headless’ devices – is more difficult to manage and secure.”

With devices attached to the network identified, IT organisations “must create or modify the network access policy as part of an enterprise policy enforcement strategy”, in determining “if and how these devices will be connected, as well as what role they will be assigned that will govern their access”.

“In order to monitor access and priority of IoT devices, I&O leaders need to consider additional enterprise network best practices,” Gartner states.

“These can be defining a connectivity policy, as many IoT devices will be connected via Wi-Fi; performing spectrum planning – many IoT devices may be using 2.4 GHz, but may not be using 802.11 protocols such as Bluetooth, ZigBee or Z-Wave, which may create interference; or considering packet sniffers to identify devices that may do something undesirable on the network.”

Gartner states that virtual segments will need to be created while more devices are added to an enterprise network, allowing network architects to separate all IoT assets from other network traffic, supporting each facilities management application or business unit process from other enterprise applications and users.

“As the concept of virtual segments continues to mature, the capabilities will allow network architects to prioritise the traffic of differing virtual segments as compared with the rest of the traffic on the network,” Gartner states.