Honeywell has signed a definitive agreement to purchase Nextnine, a privately held provider of security management solutions and technologies for industrial cybersecurity. The addition of Nextnine’s security solutions and secure remote service capabilities is meant to shore up Honeywell's existing range of cybersecurity technologies and increase Honeywell’s Connected Plant cybersecurity customer base.
Nextnine’s flagship technology, ICS Shield, protects industrial sites from cybersecurity attacks and enables remote monitoring of assets. It is used at more than 6,200 sites globally across the oil and gas, utility, chemical, mining and manufacturing sectors. Previously, ICS Shield had to be deployed separately for each control system vendor, resulting in multiple and separate installations at a single customer site. With this acquisition, customers will be able to deploy and operate a single system.
Founded in 1998, Nextnine has been backed to date by Infinity VC, XT Hi-Tech and several other investors.
Honeywell has the largest industrial cyber security research capabilities in the industry and has continued to increase its industrial cyber security offerings. Two such solutions are Risk Manager, the industry’s first solution to proactively monitor, measure and manage industrial cyber security risks, and Secure Media Exchange (SMX), which protects plants against threats from removable media such as USB flash drives.
