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terminals, digital media players, networking devices, industrial control devices, medical devices and printers. Even more troubling from a security per- spective, said Zscaler, is the fact that rough- ly 83 percent of IoT-based transactions are happening over plain text channels, whereas only 17 percent are using SSL. “The use of plain text is risky, opening traffic to sniffing (for passwords and other data), eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks, and other exploits, which is why it is no longer used for the vast majority of web and application traffic,” warned Zscaler. It would seem the need to transition IoT traffic to SSL could be a widely used sales conversation starter. By the end of last year, more than half of MSP surveyed by CompTIA (55 percent) said cybersecurity services were part of their offerings, and about four in 10 of those MSPs (38 percent) consider themselves pure-play MSSPs, meaning security is large- ly the only type of work they do. Certainly, the surge in IoT devices shows no signs of slowing down, and the presence of shadow IoT highlighted by Zscaler analysis should serve as a wake- up call to enterprise security professionals and a call to arms for MSPs. “Just as companies learned to create policies and to apply management and security controls to BYOD devices,” con- clude Zscaler executives, “they need to start paying that same level of attention to shadow IoT.” o EMERGENT Reasons MSPs Not Moving into Managed IoT Services Cost/Challenge in training staff/developing internal expertise 42% Customers are not asking for managed IoT services yet 40% IoT market is still in too early stage to enter 32% Startup investment 29% Unclear revenue model/uncertain ROI 29% IoT does not align with our managed services offering 27% Confusion over which IoT vendors to align with 25% Source: CompTIA The IoT Opportunity Just how hot is the managed IoT market? IDC, for its part, reports that worldwide spending for managed IoT services was worth $3.5 billion in 2017 and is increasing at a five-year compound annual growth rate of 23.7 percent, expected to reach $10.1 billion by 2022. In the U.S., managed IoT spending was $1.6 billion in 2017 and is increasing at a five-year CAGR of 17.7 percent to what IDC expects to be $3.7 billion by 2022. And according to IOT Analytics, there were more than 4.7 billion “things” connected to the internet in 2016. By 2021, that number will increase to more than 11 billion and, by 2025, it is estimated that the number will hit 21 billion. Market research firm IDC predicts that IoT spending will surpass the $1 trillion mark in 2022. It’s not just predictions that are skyrocketing. In May 2019, when the Zscaler’s research team released its initial report on IoT traffic generated by its enterprise customer base, the Zscaler cloud was processing 56 million IoT transactions a month. By February 2020, that number had soared to 33 million transactions a day and to an astounding 1 billion IoT transactions per month, representing a 1,500 percent increase. “And while the market will feature major systems integrators and some of the industry’s largest services firms, the downstream business opportunity is also very real for the average-sized MSP,” said CompTIA researchers. o 14 CHANNEL VISION | July - August, 2020