What is a smart home?

The term ”smart home” may sound like science fiction to some, bringing to mind a huge space of minimalistic, sober design, full of steel and screens. A house that gently wakes the owner by parting the curtains and playing his/her favorite music after a short analysis of the quality of sleep. A home that picks out the best toothpaste to match the recommendations from the last visit to the dentist and the best clothes for the weather and day’s calendar. A home that cooks, cleans, organizes and manages itself with the help of a cute, helpful robot wandering about and eagerly awaiting voice commands.

While the image may differ from reality, we are already living in smart homes without realizing it. We can now remotely control, monitor and access more and more smart gadgets from our homes. We can make our smart home play music, turn off the lights even after we leave home, turn on the heat before coming in from a freezing winter day, secure doors and windows, or roast the beef just in time for dinner.

One increasingly popular smart home device is a voice assistant, a personal helper that never gets tired of questions or commands.The list of smart devices is expanding every day, allowing us to delegate more mundane tasks to smart devices, on a schedule, from anywhere in the world, by phone or internet.

The only significant difference in the smart home systems from science fiction movies or novels from today smart home is the scale of installation and personalization.

But the smart home is here.

Today, the smart home term describes a house that contains a communication network that connects different appliances and gadgets. Simply put, if on top of traditional devices (laptops, computers, smartphone, tablets) you also have one or more devices that connect to your network, and you communicate with through an app – you have a smart home.

Living in a smart home has benefits – convenience and savings of time, money and energy, but it also comes with risk if the smart devices are unprotected. A single unsecured gadget can allow cybercriminals to access everything else that shares the same network and take them over or steal personal information.

The most cost-effective cybersecurity solution for a smart home is one that protects the entire network. For example, Bitdefender BOX 2 is an easy-to-use, all-in-one cybersecurity solution for all smart devices, protecting especially the ones for which there are no other security options.

Your home is getting smarter and you should be too, regarding your safety.