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Considering this topic in a professional and business context can rapidly deflect reality. The reality is that the Internet is freely available and, in so many respects, unburdened by regulation. In the relative blink of an eye this has set many expectations for the world population - and none of us are looking back. The Internet is now as much a utility as the water supply in our Western homes. The other, almost complementary reality is that BYOD has utterly eradicated any boundary - such as it was - between the employer and the employee, in both IT and networking terms. Not only will the genie not return to the bottle, but the genie has run off with all aspects of network management firmly in its grasp, including our homes.

A strong characteristic of BYOD was that IT and network professionals were caught out and have been playing catch-up ever since. BYOD connects people to their IoS applications, including their health and fitness monitor (for example Fitbit) and their fridge or car. Organisations also want to extend their reach, and as you can see in the Paessler Masterclass on page 26 of this issue, prawn farms and petrol prices are also in the mix!

Be in no doubt, the IoS is here - and it will form an increasingly important element of connectivity into and out of your network. In fact a recent assessment from Gartner foresees the installed base of "things" excluding PCs, tablets and smartphones, growing to 26 billion units by 2020. I forecast exactly the same number for the installed base of stuff…

Such connectivity is not that new because of the relatively small, but in its own way radically important, growth in RS232 connections before TCP/IP took hold. It offered a broad range of connection and service types, not that dissimilar to the IoS dialogue. I don't know its size, but there will be some migration of stuff from closed RS232 networks to the IoS, and without doubt this will be an improvement.

So much for recent history - if the professional response to IoS as characterised by BYOD is to be different then steps should be taken. The network is a good place to start with the migration of network addressing to IPv6 (128 bit addresses) for increased capacity (IPv4 uses 32 bit addressing). Network address management, even for the most modest of networks, has always been challenging - how we have all depended on poring over spreadsheets to locate that address conflict! It's a flagrant waste of resource that leaves address management always out of date and incapable of meeting underlying business needs. Moving to IPv6 worsens this and other critical network services, including DNS and DHCP.

If not for the common sense reason of relegating voluminous, repetitive tasks to automation, then for the more operational imperative of keeping network services running, automation of critical network services is no longer an option, if ever it was. Can you imagine the consequences of an IP address conflict between the home-based health monitoring of a critically ill patient and a home-based enthusiast publishing fuel prices?

If IP addressing is a challenge to be resolved before IoS takes hold, then hot on its logical heels is security. Once granted a lease on an IP address, a device is connected which may or may not present its own security risk. But is the idea that industrial scale IP connections will increase risk unfounded?

Well to start with it's on people's minds, and those people are either potential victims or perpetrators. Then there is the industrial scale. We all understand that one vector of attack involves gaining network access by any means, then slowly infiltrating the network: that's risk.

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