Thought Leaders on Internet of Things: Ordr CEO Greg Murphy (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the size of the IoT device market right now? How many IoT devices are out there? How much of that is secured?

Greg Murphy: It’s everything from a small sensor that costs a few cents all the way up to multi-million dollar manufacturing systems and medical systems. The number of medical IoT devices is growing by 22% year over year. The number of IoT devices greatly outnumbers the number of people on the planet. The question about these devices is how vulnerable they are. That depends a lot on what the device is, where is it connected and whether any compensating controls are put in place.

If a device is on a network segment with a firewall and all communication to the internet is blocked out, even if it has a vulnerability, it’s not a vulnerability that’s going to be exploited from outside the organization. These IoT devices are often deployed on relatively flat networks. When malware gets to the environment, it’s pretty easy to spread laterally.

Sramana Mitra: Whom do you work with? Do you sell directly to enterprises or IoT makers?

Greg Murphy: Traditionally, we have sold primarily to enterprises. We sell to the IT organization or the security organization. They need to monitor their environment, know the vulnerabilities, and take steps to correct those. What we’re seeing, more and more, is that as the organizations become more aware of these vulnerabilities and given the challenge that organizations have around staffing cyber security analysts, we’re seeing interest in managed services.

Is there some third party that I can engage with that will monitor my network and help me understand the vulnerabilities? The managed service channel is increasing. In the future, a lot of our sales are going to come through managed service providers and they can bring this type of solution to the medium enterprise or organizations that don’t have tremendous internal resources.

Some of the IoT manufacturers themselves are starting to offer a secure managed service. If you buy our infrastructure, you can buy a service along with it. We will help make sure that these devices are monitored, secure, patched, and updated. Those are other channels.

Sramana Mitra: These managed services that are going after the mid-market, are they specialized IoT security managed services? Are existing managed service providers expanding their footprint?

Greg Murphy: It’s both. When you look at the medium enterprise in the healthcare world, there are managed service providers whose job is to manage medical devices. Make sure that they are kept operational from sanitization of devices to updating and patching those devices. Those providers are starting to look into offering a security service on top. There are also more traditional managed service providers that have been providing managed endpoint services to medium enterprises.

Now those enterprises are coming back and saying, “We find that 50% of the devices that are connected to our network own the types of devices that you are managing with your traditional agent-based solution. Can you offer us a solution for the whole enterprise?” I see people who specialize in IoT to more generalist managed security service providers.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders on Internet of Things: Ordr CEO Greg Murphy
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