Gartner: IoT Brings Need for Security

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According to Gartner, 2016 global spending on Internet of Things (IoT) security is to reach $348 million-- a 23.7% increase over 2015 of $251.5m and a figure set to reach $547m by 2018.

IoT SecurityOverall IoT security spending is set to be initially "moderate," but it should increase at a faster rate come 2020 thanks to a combination of improved skills, organisational change and more scalable service options improve execution.

"The market for IoT security products is currently small but it is growing as both consumers and businesses start using connected devices in ever greater numbers," the analyst remarks. "Gartner forecasts that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016, up 30% from 2015, and will reach 11.4bn by 2018. However, considerable variation exists among different industry sectors as a result of different levels of prioritisation and security awareness."

Demand for IoT security products depends on IoT adoption by the consumer and industry sectors. Dominating endpoint spending is connected cars and other complex machines and vehicles, such as heavy trucks, commercial aircraft, and farming and construction equipment.

Gartner also predicts 25% of attacks on enterprises will involve IoT by 2020-- even if IoT will account less than 10% of security budgets. Such limited budgets lead to vendors failing to provide usable IoT security features, as well too much focus on the spotting of vulnerabilities and exploits instead of segmentation and long-term means to better protect IoT.

"The effort of securing IoT is expected to focus more and more on the management, analytics and provisioning of devices and their data. IoT business scenarios will require a delivery mechanism that can also grow and keep pace with requirements in monitoring, detection, access control and other security needs," the analyst concludes. "The future of cloud-based security services is in part linked with the future of the IoT. In fact, the IoT's fundamental strength in scale and presence will not be fully realized without cloud-based security services to deliver an acceptable level of operation for many organizations in a cost-effective manner. By 2020, Gartner predicts that over half of all IoT implementations will use some form of cloud-based security service."

Go Gartner Forecast: IoT Security WW 2016