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IoT and ICS security primed for explosive growth

The IoT and ICS security market is primed for explosive growth, with distributed firewall revenue growing 30-fold.

Market research firm Infonetics Research released excerpts from its new IoT and Industrial Control System Security market size and forecasts report, which tracks Internet of Things (IoT) and industrial control system (ICS) distributed firewall revenue and units.

The ICS and IoT security report contains Infonetics’ first market forecast for distributed firewalls, the product category that buyers are diving into first. 

This new market is generating significant interest due to the nature of the threats themselves—everyone pays attention to attacks on critical public infrastructure—and because providing security solutions into the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA)/ICS and IoT space represents a way for existing security vendors to tap into explosive growth in this area.

“Companies deploying security for their control system environments are likely to follow a defense-in-depth model, deploying security in as many places as possible as long as it’s non-disruptive to operations, as there is ZERO tolerance for security solutions interrupting normal operations in nearly all environments. For many companies, deploying distributed firewalls to protect their control system networks will be an important part of the overall security picture,” says Jeff Wilson, principal analyst for security at Infonetics Research.

Infonetics projects the distributed firewall segment of the industrial control system and Internet of Things security market to skyrocket to over US$675 million by 2018.

U.S. oil, gas, and utility companies are the first targets for most vendors building solutions in the IoT/ICS security space, but some vendors are seeing significant interest from oil and gas companies in the Middle East.

The bulk of the IoT and ICS distributed firewall market today is gobbled up by traditional security vendors selling firewalls and intrusion prevention systems (IPS) into industrial environments.

However, specialist vendors like Wurldtech, Tofino, and Secure Crossing are looking to make serious headway over the next few years selling specialised distributed firewall products.

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