Business View Magazine | March 2020

30 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE MARCH 2020 support of the 20 associations, coalitions and forums. As a next step, CTA’s standards team has brought together experts from our member companies to develop a technical standard. The technical standard will have the rigor and detail engineers need when building a product. CTA standards are voluntary; consensus industry standards and the process are accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). The benefit of having an ANSI-accredited organization such as CTA coordinate this effort is the resulting standard is an American National Standard and, as such, it has greater weight with everyone – from developers to regulators. CTA’s new document is expected to be published early next year. This document will help retailers who are looking for ways to have discussions with manufacturers and suppliers about cybersecurity. On the one hand, retailers do not maintain the significant number of cybersecurity experts that would be needed to, individually, verify each product they stock. Such a distributed approach of each retailer verifying each product is woefully inefficient. Also, the labor market can’t really provide enough cybersecurity experts to fill the needs of all the retailers. And yet, retailers need to understand and manage their supply chain. So, we pool the expertise in a technical standard. Retailers and manufacturers can agree on supporting such a technical standard. The retailer doesn’t need a huge team of testers and the manufacturer doesn’t need to establish in-house criteria. Each can focus on the part they do best. Better design, installation, configuration, and onboarding will all help the IoT security picture as we transition to a 5G world. We just need consensus on technical requirements and broad use of best practices. With these steps, we’re making real progress in transforming the Internet of Things.