IoT Managed Security Services to See Significant Financial Impact from Industrial Applications

Industrial applications are set to be the core focus for IoT Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) with ABI Research forecasting overall market revenues to increase fivefold and top $11 billion in 2021. Though OEM and aftermarket telematics, fleet management, and video surveillance use cases primarily drive today’s IoT MSSP service revenues, continued innovation in industrial applications that include the connected car, smart cities, and utilities will be the future forces that IoT MSSPs need to target.

“Security adoption will thrive across the industrial segment as manufacturers seek to enable new levels of efficiencies, while ensuring that they are not only providing continuous operation, but also supporting applications critical to health, safety, and life,” says Phil Sealy, Senior Analyst at ABI Research. “In addition, secure Over the Air, or OTA, applications present a new and significant revenue opportunity for IoT MSSPs to offer digital upselling and upgrade opportunities.”

ABI Research stresses that there will not be one sole technology that addresses all IoT security challenges; in actuality, the fact that true end-to-end IoT security is near impossible for a single vendor to achieve is a primary reason for the rise in vendors offering managed security services to plug security gaps. The “as a Service” model will allow a diverse range of vendors including G&D, Gemalto, GlobalSign, Entrust Datacard Harman, NextNine, Oberthur Technologies, and Symantec to diversify security services into new IoT use cases and end markets, playing to their strengths and expertise gained from the security innovation and technologies developed within legacy non-IoT end markets.

“Although the monetization opportunity may not yet be well understood within the consumer segment, the ability to add new features across the life cycle of a device should not be underestimated,” concludes Sealy. “Security will, in the future, form part of the purchase choice, directly driven by improved security education and a broader demand to protect digital assets in the same sense as users protect their physical assets today. For this reason, security service providers, although largely invisible today, may become the household names of tomorrow as IoT security moves from a requirement to a product differentiator.”

These findings are from ABI Research’s Managed Security Services for the IoT report.