Editor’s note: More than 1B devices served?Symantec expands its coverage into Operations Technology to secure the Internet of Things (IoT), writes Ezra Gottheil of Technology Business Research.

HAMPTON, N.H. – For Symantec, IoT is a challenge and an opportunity.

The company is positioning itself as an all-encompassing security provider and partner to participants in the emerging IoT space. IoT security requirements are stringent; because IoT interfaces with the physical world, a security failure could cause physical harm.

At the same time, many of the “things” in the Internet of Things will not support Symantec’s existing portfolio of IT security products. Also, the Operations Technology (OT) organizations that administer these devices are not familiar with either Symantec or IT security products.

To meet these challenges and seize these opportunities, Symantec has been working with Operations Technology personnel to develop a new line of security products, parallel to the company’s IT offerings, but suited to the different requirements of OT devices. As with many IoT strategies, the goal is to join IT and OT under one umbrella. In Symantec’s case, the umbrella is called the Unified Security Strategy.

Symantec announced last week that the company’s products are now securing more than one billion IoT devices, ranging from cars and consumer electronics to medical devices and industrial control systems. In the announcement, Symantec pointed to these IoT products as critical to protecting IoT:

  • Embedded Critical Systems Protection to lock down device software
  • IoT Roots of Trust and Device Certificates: For new devices, this embeds encryption and authentication tools.
  • Code Signing Certificates and Secure App Services for a number of relevant code formats, to ensure that code running on devices is authorized.

Symantec plans to expand its IoT security portfolio and integrate it with IT security systems. Integration is required for both management of IoT and IT security systems and for threat detection across entire systems.

TBR believes that the availability of mature integrated security systems for IoT will accelerate the already rapid growth of IoT. Symantec, whose reported enterprise security revenue declined 12.7% year-to-year in 2Q15 and grew only 1% outside of accounting adjustments, has invested and will continue to invest to attach the company to this growth engine.

TBR believes Symantec’s investment in IoT will contribute to revenue growth in 2H16 and CY2017. The move toward IoT fits with its overall goals of securing next-generation threats with products, such as a new ATP-Endpoint product due for general availability later this year, as the market moves away from strict reliance on traditional anti-malware products.

IT companies like Google, Intel and Microsoft are focusing their strategies on new devices with new sensors, running on adaptations of existing operating systems and with sufficient compute, memory and storage resources to run versions of existing IT security products. A large part of the IoT opportunity, however, is in the large installed base of sensors in existing devices, sensors that send their data to control panels and control rooms.

For these devices, the opportunity is in connecting the devices via the Internet, to allow consolidating and analyzing their data to extract additional value. The Internet connection, however, makes the devices vulnerable to attack. Many of these devices will not run existing IT security solutions. This is the problem that Symantec is working to solve.

(C) TBR