Gartner: IoT Security Spending Will Reach $840 Million By 2020

IoT security spending will reach $348 million worldwide this year and $840 million by 2020, according to a new report from Gartner.

And more than 25 percent of cyberattacks against enterprises will involve IoT devices, the April 25 report predicts.

IoT devices used in vertical industries will represent the largest area of growth in security spending, Gartner stated, followed by the automotive industry, consumer devices and energy management. IoT endpoints are expected to have a 32 percent annual growth rate and that spending will predominately be from connected cars and machinery.

“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,” Ruggero Contu, research director at Gartner, wrote in Monday’s report. “However, considerable variation exists among different industry sectors as a result of different levels of prioritization and security awareness.”

The report stated that security vendors may find providing IoT protection to be a challenge because of the limited budgets and the focus on spotting vulnerabilities and exploits when they occur — instead of on long-term solutions that prevent attacks before they happen.

“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,” said Mr. Contu. “The future of cloud-based security services is in part linked with the future of the IoT.”

Related:
Why IoT device security remains abysmal

Three ways the IoT can be hacked

Gartner report: real-time analytics with the IoT