IoT security spending to hit $348m this year, cloud security vital

As internet of things ramps up, so too does security around the technology, with Gartner forecasting IoT security spend to hit US$348 million this year.

The analyst firm says more than 25% of enterprise attacks by 2020 expected to involve IoT, but has warned that there is ‘considerable variation’ among different industry sectors around IoT security, as a result of different levels of prioritisation and security awareness.

By 2018, Gartner says it expects IoT security spend to hit $547.2 million globally – and that’s just the beginning, with Gartner dubbing the increase ‘initially moderate’ and saying it will increase at a faster rate after 2020 as improved skills, organisational change and more scalable service options improve execution.

The company, which has forecast that 6.4 billion connected things wll be in use worldwide this year, up 30%, says while 25% of identified attacks in enterprises will involve IoT, IoT will only account for less than 10% of IT security budgets.

“Security vendors will be challenged to provide usable IoT security features because of the limited assigned budgets for IoT and the decentralised approach to early IoT implementations in organizations,” Gartner says.

“Vendors will focus too much on spotting vulnerabilities and exploits, rather than segmentation and other long-term means that better protect IoT.”

Ruggero Contu, Gartner research director, says 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 says.

"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,” he says.

Contu says by 2020, Gartner predicts that over half of all IoT implementations will use some form of cloud-based security service.