IoT security spending to reach $348 million this year

The IoT security budget will rise 23.7 percent to $348 million in 2016 and reach $547 million by 2018, according to a new Gartner report.

As more people become interested in connected cars, as well as spending on industry-grade equipment that requires proper security, the IoT security market will grow exponentially.

“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,” said Ruggero Contu, research director at Gartner.

Gartner forecasts that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016, up 30 percent from 2015, and will reach 11.4 billion by 2018. However, considerable variation exists among different industry sectors as a result of different levels of prioritization and security awareness.”

The report also states that by 2020, more than 25 percent of identified attacks on enterprises will involve the IoT, but IoT security spending will remain no bigger than 10 percent of the total IT budget.

The effort of securing IoT is expected to focus more and more on the management, analytics, and provisioning of devices and their data,” Contu added. “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.”

Developments in IoT will remain highly dependent on cloud-based services. Gartner predicts that, by 2020, over half of all IoT implementations will use some form of cloud-based security service.