IoT security spending to reach $348m in 2016: Gartner
Analyst firm Gartner predicts global spending on security for the Internet of Things (IoT) will reach $348 million this year, a 23.7 percent increase from last year's $281.5 million spend.
As the IoT gains momentum, Gartner expects the 2017 worldwide spend to fall just shy of $434 million, whilst the 2018 predicted spend is $547 million.
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"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," Ruggero Contu, research director at Gartner, said.
According to Gartner, the market for IoT security products is dependent on IoT adoption by both consumer and industry, expecting endpoint spending to be dominated by connected cars, as well as other complex machines and vehicles such as heavy trucks, commercial aircraft, and farming and construction equipment.
Additionally, Gartner predicts that by 2020, more than 25 percent of identified attacks in enterprises will involve IoT, despite IoT accounting for less than 10 percent of total IT security budgets. The analyst firm also expects security vendors to be challenged when trying to provide usable IoT security features due to such a limited budget.
"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," Contu said.
"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 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."
Previously, Gartner said that by the end of 2016 some 6.4 billion "things" -- devices from toasters and kettles to cars and hospital equipment -- will be connected to the internet.
That figure represents a 30 percent rise from 2015 and Gartner expects this figure will grow further to reach 20.8 billion by 2020. By 2016, as many as 5.5 million new things will become connected every day and as a result, the growing IoT will support total services spending of $235 billion in 2016, up 22 percent from 2015, the analyst predicts.
According to Bitdefender, these 6.4 billion internet-connected devices promise to take homes to an unprecedented level of comfort; however, the internet security firm believes this new digital convenience takes its toll on private lives.
"As we have seen in the early stages of IoT development, gadgets designed for our home can talk with each other, yet they risk being overheard when communicating sensitive data," the company said. "The IoT can reach its full potential only if interactions between users, devices, applications and the cloud are authentic and secure.
The company also said that the IoT expands the reach of surveillance and tracking, thus leaving users with few or no options to customise privacy settings or control what happens to their data.
Earlier this year, research from security firm Tripwire suggested that companies are worried about buggy IoT gadgets, which could provide a backdoor into their corporate networks.
Two thirds of Tripwire's executive-level survey respondents said that business efficiencies will force them to adopt IoT devices despite the security risks, with only a third of CISOs expecting to receive additional funding to mitigate such risks in the next 12 to 24 months.
More than half of those surveyed by Tripwire said that the deployment of IoT devices is ahead of the technology necessary to protect them; and 71 percent of executives believe that the security needed to lock down IoT devices is between 12 and 24 months behind the deployment of these devices.