Three days, thousands of conversations, and one thing that kept coming up: IoT teams are no longer asking whether they need better security. They know it's a priority.
Embedded World 2026 confirmed the shift we have been seeing in our conversations with customers across Europe. Here is what stood out.
Four things we took away
1: Security is no longer a late-stage question
In past years, security came up at the end of procurement conversations. At Embedded World this year, it came up early. NIS2 is a factor, but the shift goes deeper. More teams are building security into the architecture from the start, not bolting it on after deployment.
This is where cellular IoT has a real problem. Most connectivity setups were never designed with security in mind.
2: Remote access is the conversation no one has solved
Third-party vendor access to OT environments is also becoming a topic for many. How do you give a service technician access to a remote device without opening up the rest of the network? How do you limit that access to a specific time window? How do you know what they did while they were in?
These are not theoretical questions. They are live operational problems with no clean answer in most setups.
3: Real-time visibility is still rare
We demonstrated the IXT CMP at the booth. The reaction was consistent: people were surprised to see live device data. Not data from yesterday or this morning. Live.
Most teams have learned to live with 24 to 48-hour delays from their connectivity platforms. They have built processes around the gap. When they see what real-time looks like, the gap becomes hard to ignore.
4: The market is consolidating around fewer, more capable providers
Several conversations at the show touched on provider fatigue. Managing multiple SIM vendors across different markets, each with its own portal, billing cycle, and support contact, is an operational burden that scales badly.
The appetite for a single provider with global coverage, real security, and one dashboard is real. The question is whether the providers claiming to offer this actually deliver it.
If you were at Embedded World and want to continue a conversation, reach us at ixt.io.
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