The business impact of IIoT vulnerabilities

In recent years, we have witnessed the rapid development and deployment of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices in organizations and throughout a wide range of application domains. One outcome of the scale and diversity of applications is the emergence of new and critical security threats. These pose significant concerns for an enterprise and need to be addressed strategically at the top level. From an organization’s perspective, what is needed is an appreciation of what these IIoT vulnerabilities mean for the business and how they can be presented to the executive level, which is the motivation behind this inquiry. We provide arguments for the criticality of the situation based on the normal accident theory and employ the action design research approach as the proposed method. The results illustrate the vulnerabilities for the executive level in the form of a dashboard, in order to facilitate management decisions.