The rapid expansion of connected devices across enterprise and industrial environments presents a pressing security challenge for organisations preparing for 2026 and beyond. Increasingly, a large portion of a company’s device estate cannot be secured through traditional software agents or conventional update mechanisms. Many sensors, embedded controllers, medical instruments and legacy systems are either incapable of running additional software, cannot tolerate downtime for patching, or are geographically dispersed in remote or hostile environments.
Conventional endpoint security, built on the assumption that every device can host a monitoring agent, struggles at scale in environments where devices are resource constrained or run proprietary firmware. Attempting to retrofit traditional security tools often results in blind spots across thousands of device types from hundreds of vendors, increasing attack surface and operational complexity.
Agentless IoT security reframes this problem by decoupling protection from the devices themselves. Instead of installing security software on each endpoint, agentless solutions observe devices from the outside. They use network traffic analysis, infrastructure logs and application interfaces to discover and classify every IP‑connected device. By doing so, organisations gain visibility into assets they did not even know existed. This inventory of devices and behaviours becomes the foundation for identity‑based controls and policy enforcement that can be applied without touching the device itself.
Tern plc (LON:TERN) backs exciting, high growth IoT innovators in Europe. They provide support and create a genuinely collaborative environment for talented, well-motivated teams.
