Pike Pulse Report: Smart Grid Cyber Security Threat Management
Assessment of Strategy and Execution for 15 Leading Cyber Security Vendors
Smart grid cyber security remains a nascent market. The competitive landscape has established smart grid specialists, niche players, and well-known enterprise security vendors lumbering onto the field. While cyber security is often considered a mature market, this corner – smart grid cyber security – is not mature at all. The leaders that we identify in this analysis are well positioned for today’s market but some of the large corporations entering the scene can shape a market to their own liking. The three Leaders include one household name and two that are known only inside their own industry. That is an accurate summary of this market. For the moment, size and scale appear to be somewhat of a disadvantage. Specialist companies have fared well. The ability to quickly react to the market has prevailed so far, but it is by no means certain that large size will remain a disadvantage in the future. There is much yet to be decided.
Some trends in the smart grid industry may cause significant change during the coming twelve months. Chief among those, utilities are making it clear that they see the most meaningful ROI in distribution automation, not in smart metering. Smart grid vendors, and therefore security vendors as well, are beginning to hear and process that message. The Leaders in our ranking already have done that.
This Pike Research report evaluates 15 of the leading cyber security threat management vendors in the smart grid market and rates them on 12 criteria for strategy and execution, including vision, go-to-market strategy, partnerships, product strategy and roadmap, technical innovation, geographic reach, market share, sales and marketing, product performance and features, product portfolio, control system focus, and staying power. Using Pike Research’s proprietary Pike Pulse methodology, vendors are profiled, rated, and ranked with the goal of providing industry participants with an objective assessment of these companies’ relative strengths and weaknesses in the emerging smart grid cyber security threat management marketplace.