25 leading IoT security companies

7. Dedrone

This startup is unique in that it specializes in airspace security — detecting drones that invade protected zones whether at an airport or above a stadium or industrial facility. Dedrone’s platform combines hardware sensors and machine learning software, providing early warning, classification of and mitigation against drone threats. Its hardware can be mounted to facades or windows and identifies approaching drones using visual, acoustic and frequency sensors. Noise, movement pattern, silhouette, and RF and Wi-Fi signals are processed and evaluated with the intelligent DroneTracker software. DroneTracker’s correlation and analysis of this information classifies approaching drones and triggers alarms to alert security staff. Third-party sensors, such as surveillance cameras, radar, jammers or other countermeasures, can be integrated with the platform.

Dedrone has an active and growing installed base. Its most notable references include the Clinton-Trump presidential debates, a Suffolk County correctional facility in New York, the royal family of Qatar, the New York Mets stadium and the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Dedrone was founded in 2014 by CEO Joerg Lamprecht, CTO Rene Seeber and Chief Operating Officer Ingo Seebach. The company is backed by investors including Felicis Ventures; Menlo Ventures; and John Chambers, former CEO and chairman of Cisco Systems.

8. Dell EMC

Dell may traditionally be best known as a hardware vendor, but the company offers an array of security offerings throughout its various subsidiaries ranging from RSA to SecureWorks to VMware and beyond. Dell itself offers a variety of security services tailored for networks, data, endpoints, identity and access management. From an IoT perspective, the company recently announced a realignment that would harmonize its security offerings across its subsidiaries.

“We have things like NSX from VMware that focuses heavily on microsegmentation and new types of security concepts [such as app defense],” said Ray O’Farrell, CTO of Dell subsidiary VMware.

The Dell subsidiary and encryption progenitor RSA serves 30,000 customers internationally. The RSA algorithm, which launched in 1977, proved to be a pioneering public key cryptosystem. Today, it is widely used for encryption included in many IoT applications. The RSA Archer platform, which has received accolades from Gartner and Forrester, helps organizations with operational risk management.

From an IoT perspective, RSA is looking closely at how risk applies to IoT implementations starting at the edge. “In conjunction with Dell, RSA believes that the security battleground for IoT is going to be at the edge. It is the ‘things’ themselves and the gateways they connect to within the enterprise,” said Brian Girardi, vice president, product architecture and research at RSA. One of RSA’s core competencies is identity and access management, which for IoT implementations often spans from the things and the edge up a core data center or cloud services. RSA also has a visibility and detection business known as the RSA NetWitness suite, which is designed to help organizations determine if they have been breached.

SecureWorks, a public company with Dell as the majority owner, offers a SaaS platform, SecureWorks Client Portal, that is designed to help monitor and manage security threats and incidents. The business offers managed security services for organizations wishing to offload cybersecurity whereas RSA focuses more on security products and research.

9. EY

EY offers an array of cybersecurity consulting services, operating a dedicated unit that focuses on the risk posed by Internet of Things deployments, including both industrial and consumer implementations.

Aleksander Poniewierski, Ph.D., leads IoT globally for EY Advisory and is a cybersecurity professional with over 20 years of experience in this space. “With IoT, we force the concept of security by design,” Poniewierski said. “With IoT, we need to think about security from the beginning and infuse the concept of security into initial discussions regarding products, philosophy and the business case.”

The company’s combined financial and security prowess gives it an advantage as an advisor to enterprise, industrial and government clients. Instead of acting like a traditional IT security guardian, EY can serve as an IoT advisor, helping clients simultaneously refine the business case for an IoT project while also mapping out a strategy for locking it down.

EY has a robust cybersecurity practice with practitioners active across 150 countries. The company can help organizations establish internal threat intelligence programs. It also offers subscription-based and managed cyberthreat intelligence services.

EY also is a leader in cybersecurity research, providing survey-based reports on cybersecurity at large as well as focusing on IoT in particular. Many of the company’s cyber experts hail from the public sector, including professionals from government agencies such as the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security and the military.

10. ForgeRock

ForgeRock, which specializes in digital identity management, is working to transform how businesses build trusted relationships with people, services and things. Customers adopting the ForgeRock Identity Platform as their digital identity system of record can use the technology to address stringent regulations for privacy and consent (GDPR, HIPAA, FCC privacy, etc.), safeguard their IoT projects and help monetize customer relationships.

Unlike legacy identity and access management developers, the company designed the ForgeRock platform for the needs of companies with scalable IoT business projects. As such, the ForgeRock Identity Platform can accommodate billions of digital identities for IoT devices, as well as user identities, services and machines.

In addition, ForgeRock customers can use features including fine-grained authentication (also known as push authentication decision trees) and authorization via push notifications to shape customer experiences through the evolution of a single online session or over multiple sessions based on digital identity. The company says that these capabilities also offer benefits for user experiences, enabling passwordless authentication on first contact through to transaction consummation and fulfillment.

From a cybersecurity perspective, ForgeRock also offers security for IoT edge devices to help prevent man-in-the-middle and other types of attacks.

ForgeRock recently attracted $88 million in series D funding. Its customers include Toyota, Allianz, McKesson, the government of Norway, TomTom, GEICO and Vodafone. ForgeRock is an active member of the EdgeX Foundry and Automotive Grade Linux.