Connected things have been around for decades in the manufacturing, utilities, and resources industries and have solved the very real requirement of needing to know and understand how large-scale systems are operating; they have provided the Operational Technology (OT) to the more commonly talked about Information Technology (IT).

An example of such a system is supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA). Typically, a SCADA system consists of a large number of networked sensors reporting their data over proprietary protocols to a central resource that displays information and allow the decisions to be made. The data is stored in a large database known as a historian for ongoing analysis. These industrial control systems have existed for many years and are largely secure by default as they isolate the sensors and controls in a private network, for example, a process control network.

Because SCADA systems are largely proprietary or at least based on a few...