Symantec reported today that its security software is now protecting more than one billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices and that demand for protection will only increase as the number of IoT products is expected to hit 25 billion by 2020.
The company said the items under its protection range from cars, to televisions and smart meters - essentially smart electric meters found on homes - but the vast majority will fall directly into consumers' hands and will require extra care to protect. According to a report issued by Gartner in November 2014, the installed base of IoT units used by consumers will total 2.87 billion hitting the 13 billion range by 2020.
| Table 1: Internet of Things Units Installed Base by Category
Source: Gartner (November 2014) |
Because consumers are notoriously lax when it comes to securing devices Symantec is looking to remove that task from their hands.
“The majority of devices in consumer hands will already have the security inside," Shankar Somasundaram, Symantec's senior director of IoT Security, told SCMagazine.com, adding that the type of aftermarket security that dominates the IT product world does not work as well with IoT products.
Symantec is taking a different approach for corporations. To help corral all these devices Symantec plans to introduce an IoT portal for managing security from a single interface and special security analytics for proactively detecting issues on their firm's IoT network.
