Disagreement on exact numbers aside, most everyone agrees that Internet of Things products will increase in coming years, with Gartner’s estimate clocking in at 20 billion. The actual number of events that come out of these connected devices is staggering, creating rich opportunities for hackers looking to cash in on device-accessed data. How will businesses secure all of the new data that hold so much promise for profits and plunder alike?

“It’s what those devices are doing. We’re talking about hundreds of trillions of events within the next decade or so, and there is virtually no way that human beings are setup to deal with those kinds of numbers,” said Peter Burris (@plburris), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio.

TheCUBE co-hosts Burris and Lisa Martin (@Luccazara) were on the ground at the Fortinet Accelerate 2017 event in Las Vegas to assess the current status of security in the enterprise. (*Disclosure below.)

As the event came to a close, Burris said that great automation technology is needed to cover more ground and to reallocate human talent “so that security doesn’t once again become the function that says, ‘no’ to everything, but rather the function that says, ‘yeah, we can do that.’ If it doesn’t happen, then that’s going to put a significant break on how fast a lot of this digital business evolution takes place,” he said.

The devil’s in the data

Burris stated that the definition of business in the Digital Age is the use of data to differentiate and drive profit. This is why security teams will be working closer with bottom-line business people in coming years.

“It’s through security that data is turned into an asset,” Burris argued. “If you don’t secure your data, it’s everywhere, because it’s easily copied; it flies around. Data and security — at least data asset, the concept of data asset — are inextricably bound,” he said.

Security in the C-suite

Martin said this new presence of security questions at the C-suite level was evident at Fortinet Accelerate 2017. “Security is now a conversation in the boardroom,” she said.

She also revealed that while hyper-connectivity of devices is certainly increasing the threat surface, the consensus at the Fortinet event was that vendors can collaborate to meet the challenge.

“I think there was a lot more positivity than I honestly anticipated,” she said, adding that the move from a security platform to security fabric looks to be the way forward for now.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Fortinet Accelerate 2017. (*Disclosure: Fortinet Inc. and other companies sponsor some Accelerate 2017 segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Fortinet nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE