Published on the 27/04/2016 | Written by Newsdesk
Half of all IoT implementations will use cloud security services of some description by 2020, but the market is currently immature…
Cybercriminals are only human it turns out. Give them something new to try and they will flock to it in droves. That’s what Gartner is predicting about technology’s current darling: the internet of things. Its analysts think that by 2020, more than 25 percent of identified attacks in enterprises will involve the IoT. Management spending on security to counter such attacks, however, is a different matter. It will lag behind, with only 10 percent of IT security budgets dedicated to defending these cyberattacks.
What is interesting is the type of security that will be required. Although endpoint security spending will be dominated by connected cars, as well as other complex machines and vehicles, such as heavy trucks, commercial aircraft, and farming and construction, according to Gartner, the challenge for vendors will be to ‘provide usable IoT security features because of the limited assigned budgets for IoT and the decentralised approach to early IoT implementations in organisations’. Vendors will focus too much on spotting vulnerabilities and exploits, rather than segmentation and other long-term means that better protect IoT it said in a statement.
Ruggero Contu a director of research for Gartner expects management to take a different tack: “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.”
He sees scalable, cloud-based security services as the answer and says that the future of both these and the IoT are interlinked.
In fact, the IoT’s fundamental strength in scale and presence will not be fully realised without cloud-based security services to deliver an acceptable level of operation for many organisations 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.”
The market for IoT security products is, of course, dependent on IoT adoption by the consumer and industry sectors and, as Contu points out, “considerable variation exists among different industry sectors as a result of different levels of prioritisation and security awareness.”
Although Gartner expects overall spending on the IoT security to be moderate in the initial stages (it will reach $547 million in 2018) it says spending will increase at a faster rate after 2020 – evidently once “improved skills, organisational change and more scalable service options improve execution”.
