Securing Connected IoT Devices For Small Business

Designing the Cloud Edge IoT security for managed service providers to gain more insights into connected IoT devices.

The following case study walks through the design of Cloud Edge security as a service solution, the challenges of showing a mapped view of devices, their risks, and suggested mitigations.

The Project

Cloud Edge is a unified threat management as a service for managed service providers to protect small business customers security needs. Data from our business analystics team showed that there are more than 1 million devices protected by Cloud Edge.

As more and more IoT devices (for example printers, smart TVs, kitchen appliances) are using Cloud Edge, the team decided to provide customers a way to discover IoT devices, learn about their vulnerabilities, and how to manage these devices.

My role was to design IoT security user experience that is simple and useful: from overview of device posture down to viewing risky device details. The design had to be colorful and draw the eye on what is important. It had to reveal information progressively so user can focus on running their small business.

Delightful Designs

Consumerization of Cybersecurity

I started the design by conducting three user interviews, two are internal users (our InfoSec team members), and a customer (William M.) who was an early adopter of IoT security. I created a pre-sprint IoT security questions to ask the participants to know their current usage of IoT, any current vendors they are using for IoT, and finally what their needs are.

After talking to stakeholders and understanding the requirements, I started the designs. Based on data that on average CE customers device usages usually are in the range of 50 endpoint and IoT devices or less.

Using this data, I designed the IoT security dashboard to only show three levels:

1. Company level—CE SaaS is multitenant, and an administrator can manage multiple company accounts
   
2. CE gateway device
   
3. Discovered endpoint (and IoT devices)
   

Below are screens showing the final design for Cloud Edge IoT security.

View prototype  ›
View file  ›