How will the field of cybersecurity need to evolve as our lives become more and more digital? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

As devices become increasingly connected, our reactive and proactive security measures need to massively improve. Connected personal devices can be great: smart watches, TV’s, refrigerators, toys, share data and speak to each other to make our lives more efficient, and even fun. But if valuable personal data can be compromised, or is shared without sufficient protection, the devices can be shut down, and consumers are faced with inconvenience and big breaches in privacy.

Experts predict that the 23 billion IoT devices installed in 2018 are predicted to reach 75 billion by 2025. The next five to ten years promise huge changes within both personal IoT devices, and the deployments we don’t encounter directly: smart devices comprising operations across the energy, manufacturing, and transportation industries. Digitizing many aspects of our industries and our daily lives has the potential to improve efficiency and convenience, but only if adequately secured.

Cyberattacks on industries pose unique threats. First and foremost, industries cannot sacrifice security for the sake of what they believe to be operational efficiency––the two need to go hand in hand. In the past, industrial operations managed and restricted access through isolation: quarantining devices and control systems to mitigate risk. But as the older, analog systems have become digitized and connected, this “security-by-isolation” approach is no longer viable or capable of protecting them. To efficiently and scalably connect the convergence of millions of users and intermittently connected devices and applications, current centralized IT enforcement systems need to be replaced by security that’s distributed, flexible, adaptive, and woven into this autonomous, any-to-any, edge-heavy ecosystem.

As the real, physical world moves towards a connected future, constantly innovating and updating our security solutions is the only way we can ensure that the benefits outweigh the security risks of connected systems.

This question originally appeared on Quora. More questions on Quora:

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