The Best Smart City Cybersecurity Companies in 2026

Quick answer: The cybersecurity companies cities most often evaluate for traffic, building, and public safety devices in 2026 include Asimily, Forescout, Ordr, Armis, Claroty, Axonius, Microsoft Defender for IoT, Tenable, Nozomi Networks, and Palo Alto Networks. Asimily fits cities that need one normalized inventory across departments, priorities based on exploitability, and segmentation simulated before enforcement. Forescout fits cities that want their own NAC, and Claroty fits contractor remote access.

Smart city is the catch-all term for formerly offline and analog municipal activities switching to online and digital. Which systems are making that conversion varies greatly from city to city. They are also often linked to open data initiatives, which make municipal datasets publicly available to improve transparency and support community innovation. However, because smart cities actively collect extensive data on all citizens, safeguarding citizen privacy must remain a paramount priority (CISA and partner agencies, April 2023). A municipal security team might be responsible for protecting traffic cameras, signal controllers, building systems in municipal facilities, public safety equipment, parking meters, and lighting controllers. These devices belong to many departments and were bought over years from many vendors. Contractors often install them on remote links far from a centralized headquarters. Security teams are small, and the devices rarely appear in the same asset list as laptops and servers.

A good security platform for that environment finds every asset across departments, including such things as field devices behind roadside and building controllers. It then highlights which exposures an attacker could actually exploit on your network and contains them without breaking a traffic, building, or public safety system.

This guide covers the criteria that separate municipal-ready platforms from general security tools. It also provides a side-by-side view of the companies that appear most often in smart city evaluations and explains where each one fits. Asimily publishes this guide and includes itself in the analysis. Our descriptions draw on public positioning, technical approaches, and our own market research and conversations. Please take this into account and perform your own independent assessment.

The Best Smart City Cybersecurity Companies at a Glance

Asimily appears first as the publisher; the order of the other companies is not a ranking.

Company	Primary Approach	Best Fit For
Asimily	Agentless visibility with normalized asset inventory data, flow data analysis, exploitability analysis that separates risk from severity, and microsegmentation via Segmentation Orchestration with Policy Simulation across IoT, OT, and IT, plus Configuration Control to snapshot known good states	Cities that need one unified, normalized inventory across departments and enforced segmentation that does not break city services
Forescout	Device discovery, classification, and network access control across IT, OT, and IoT	Teams that want visibility and network access control from one vendor, independent of their switch vendor’s platform
Ordr	AI-driven device profiling and least-privilege policy across converged IT and OT	Lean city teams that protect devices through segmentation only, with AI-assisted policy applied through existing firewalls and switches
Armis	Agentless asset intelligence and exposure management across IT, OT, IoT, and cloud	City IT teams standardized on ServiceNow workflows
Axonius	Asset aggregation from existing IT, security, cloud, and SaaS tools through adapters, with Cyber-Physical Assets fingerprinting	IT-led teams that need to reconcile assets already held in IT, cloud, and SaaS tools
Claroty	Cyber-physical systems protection: asset management, exposure management, network protection, secure access, and threat detection	Cities that need secure remote access for contractors
Microsoft Defender for IoT	Agentless network sensors for OT and IoT monitoring	Organizations with large existing investments in Microsoft security tools
Tenable	OT vulnerability management with passive monitoring and active device queries, inside Tenable One	Teams that want device inventory inside an existing Tenable program
Nozomi Networks	OT and IoT asset inventory, continuous monitoring, and threat and anomaly detection	Cities with OT-heavy environments that need specialized industrial visibility
Palo Alto Networks	Next-generation firewalls, OT security services, and XDR across IT and OT	Cities extending an existing Palo Alto deployment to field and facility networks

What to Look for in a Smart City Cybersecurity Company

Smart city environments break assumptions that most security tools are built on: devices can’t take agents, they belong to different departments, and many are reachable only over remote links or through the tools another team already runs. Use these six criteria to test whether a platform was built for municipal networks:

1. Visibility Across Departments and Remote Facilities

• Agentless Discovery: Discovers traffic cameras, signal controllers, building systems, and the devices around them, captured agentlessly into a unified inventory with normalized data across live operations.
• Remote Link Coverage: Queries devices or their management systems where traffic can’t be mirrored, pulls records from tools the city already runs, and uses appropriately sized sensors so a remote cabinet or small facility isn’t expensive to cover.
• Unified Asset Coverage: Normalizes IoT and IT assets that may share the same networks and records which department owns each device.

2. Integration With the Tools a City Already Runs

• Bi-Directional and Directed Data Flow: Integrates with the configuration management database, NAC, and firewalls the city already owns (with data flows operating bi-directionally or as read-only depending on the specific integration), ensuring device context, risk, and policy reach the tools staff use every day.
• System of Record: Provides, sometimes alongside a CMDB, a system of record, which feeds other cybersecurity functions.

3. Prioritization by Exploitability Using Likelihood and Service Impact

• Contextual Exploitability: Determines whether a vulnerability is actually exploitable on a specific device in your topology, going beyond generic CVSS base scores.
• Service Impact Focus: Prioritizes risk reduction while protecting public safety and service continuity.
• Actionable Output: Delivers a short, ranked list of what attackers could exploit first, each with a documented reason for its ranking.

4. Segmentation You Can Prove Before You Deploy

• Native Policy Integration: Groups devices by function and owner and generates policies in native formats for existing tools like NACs (e.g., Cisco ISE) and firewalls to overcome segmentation project stalls, following joint guidance from CISA and partner agencies to segment access to vulnerable devices.
• Traffic Previews: Simulates policy impact against real, observed traffic, such as a contractor laptop used for roadside maintenance, to prevent unexpected disruptions before enforcement.
• No Re-Addressing: Avoids risky re-IP projects for roadside and building devices by working directly on existing network infrastructure.

5. Mitigation for Devices That Are Hard to Update

• Compensating Controls: Recommends targeted mitigations (e.g., disabling unused services, updating default credentials, with microsegmentation as an increasingly popular option alongside Zero Trust initiatives) for devices such as cameras and controllers whose manufacturer no longer supports updates.
• Selective Patching: Shrinks overall attack surface by identifying and updating devices that can safely receive firmware updates, such as supported IP cameras.

6. Guidance and Evidence on Demand

• Guidance Alignment: Supports the April 2023 Cybersecurity Best Practices for Smart Cities from CISA, the NSA, the FBI, and partner agencies, and the voluntary NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0. Both are guidance rather than regulation, so confirm what applies with counsel.
• Continuous Audit Records: Maintains an automated, audit-ready record of enforced controls, asset inventories, and changes on demand.

The Best Smart City Cybersecurity Companies in 2026

1. Asimily

Asimily is an asset protection platform covering IoT, OT, middleware, AI agents, servers, and endpoints. For cities, it unifies devices such as cameras, controllers, building systems, and the corporate network into one normalized inventory, with an owner for each device, so a small team can pinpoint risk and contain the riskiest devices.

Discovery is agentless, combining passive network analysis, flow data monitoring, and safe queries. The Asimily Edge collector gathers data at remote facilities within a bandwidth limit you set. ATT&CK Analysis measures compromise likelihood based on segmentation, patching, and context to separate risk from severity.

Segmentation Orchestration simulates and applies microsegmentation policy through existing NACs and firewalls, preserving device IPs. Asimily has no switch-level enforcement of its own. Configuration Control detects drift, while native packet capture speeds investigations. Additionally, Risk Simulator models mitigation impact, and IoT Patching updates firmware and passwords on supported devices.

Recognition: 2026 Merit Awards winner, rated 4.9/5 on Gartner Peer Insights (55 reviews, Oct 2026).*

*Gartner Peer Insights content consists of the opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences, and should not be construed as statements of fact, nor do they represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in this content nor makes any warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this content, about its accuracy or completeness, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Best fit for: Cities needing a unified, normalized asset inventory across departments and remote facilities, exploitability-based priorities, and segmentation validated before enforcement.

What to evaluate: Discovery of a system’s key devices, such as remote cameras or sensors in your environment, the documented measure of risk (as opposed to just vulnerabilities present and their severity), and microsegmentation Policy Simulation against your own traffic to spot issues that might impede smart city functions.

2. Forescout

Forescout discovers and classifies devices across IT, OT, and IoT and pairs that visibility with policy enforcement and automated response, building on its network access control capabilities. Its platform was renamed Forescout Vistaro in June 2026 (Forescout).

Best fit for: Teams that want device visibility and access control from one vendor, independent of their switch vendor’s platform.

What to evaluate: How the platform previews the impact of an enforcement action on a city network before it is applied.

3. Ordr

Ordr’s AI Protect platform profiles devices by function, behavior, and communication patterns across converged IT and OT networks, and generates least-privilege policy that an analyst approves before it is applied through existing firewalls, NACs, switches, and wireless controllers.

Best fit for: Lean city teams that want AI-assisted policy creation and natural-language investigation, and use microsegmentation only to protect devices that can’t run agents.

What to evaluate: How vulnerabilities are prioritized by exploitability on your devices, and which mitigation options exist beyond segmentation.

4. Armis

Armis Centrix is an agentless asset intelligence and exposure management platform spanning IT, OT, IoT, and cloud. ServiceNow completed its acquisition of Armis in April 2026 (Verdict), and Armis Centrix remains available as a standalone product.

Best fit for: City IT teams that run IT and security workflows in ServiceNow and want device risk inside those workflows.

What to evaluate: Depth of discovery for cameras and building systems, and whether segmentation policy can be created, simulated, and maintained from the same platform.

5. Claroty

Claroty focuses on cyber-physical systems across industrial, healthcare, and commercial environments. Its platform covers asset management, exposure management, network protection, secure remote access, and threat detection, and the company reports deployments at more than 8,000 sites across 40 industries.

Best fit for: Cities whose priority is building management systems and other cyber-physical assets, including secure remote access for contractors.

What to evaluate: How deep discovery reaches into field devices and roadside equipment, and how network protection recommendations become enforced policy on your existing NAC and firewalls.

6. Axonius

Axonius Asset Cloud aggregates asset data from existing IT, security, cloud, and SaaS tools through more than 1,400 adapters, correlating devices, software, identities, and exposures into one inventory. Remediation runs mainly through tickets and the tools already in place. Axonius has announced Cyber-Physical Assets, a product that fingerprints OT and IoT devices (SiliconANGLE, April 2026).

Best fit for: IT-led city teams that need to reconcile assets already held in IT, cloud, and SaaS tools.

What to evaluate: How well it classifies unmanaged cameras and controllers, and whether fixes go beyond tickets to segmentation or patching.

7. Microsoft Defender for IoT

Microsoft Defender for IoT uses agentless network sensors to monitor OT and IoT devices (Microsoft Learn). Organizations with large existing investments in Microsoft security tools often look at it first, because it can sit alongside the Microsoft tools they already run.

Best fit for: Organizations with large existing investments in Microsoft security tools.

What to evaluate: How devices outside the Microsoft ecosystem are classified, and how findings become enforced segmentation policy.

8. Tenable

Tenable OT Security combines passive monitoring with active querying of OT devices, and feeds OT findings into Tenable One alongside IT vulnerability management.

Best fit for: Teams that want device inventory inside an existing Tenable vulnerability management program.

What to evaluate: How findings are prioritized by exploitability on your devices, and how they become enforced controls rather than tickets.

9. Nozomi Networks

Nozomi Networks provides OT and IoT asset inventory, continuous monitoring, and threat and anomaly detection for operational environments. Mitsubishi Electric completed its acquisition of Nozomi Networks in January 2026 (Business Wire), and the company lists ABB, GE Vernova, Schneider Electric, and Hitachi Energy among its partners.

Best fit for: Cities with OT-heavy environments that need specialized industrial visibility and threat detection.

What to evaluate: How findings are prioritized by exploitability on your specific devices, what the platform does after an alert to reduce exposure, and sensor cost at your smallest facilities.

10. Palo Alto Networks

Palo Alto Networks extends its next-generation firewalls, segmentation, and Cortex XDR into OT environments to limit lateral movement between enterprise and operational networks, and documents device policy recommendations through its IoT Security service (Palo Alto Networks).

Best fit for: Cities extending an existing Palo Alto deployment from city hall and the data center to field and facility networks.

What to evaluate: Visibility into unmanaged cameras and controllers, and how segmentation rules are validated against real traffic before rollout.

Other Companies Smart City Teams Consider

Cisco, Dragos, Fortinet, TXOne Networks, and Darktrace also appear in smart city evaluations. Cisco is widespread as a provider of switching infrastructure across all industries. Dragos and TXOne Networks are often seen as OT specialists, and the others as extensions of an existing IT security investment or for specific needs such as industrial threat intelligence. Teams that need staff augmentation more than a platform partner often pair one of the companies above with a managed security provider that has OT experience.

Choosing the Right Fit for Your City

• Visibility and Cost Efficiency: Teams that can’t say which devices are connected, or who owns them, should test discovery first, including devices on remote links, and verify per-facility sensor pricing.
• Separating Risk From Severity: Not all vulnerabilities are risky, depending on how they are deployed and configured. A platform partner should be able to determine which are the riskiest, to reduce workloads and prioritize risk reduction.
• Policy Simulation and Enforcement: Teams needing enforcement should evaluate whether the platform can simulate and maintain policy across existing firewalls and NACs without requiring new access control hardware.
• Integration and Ownership Proof: IT-led teams should verify how device data and department ownership flow into the tools they already run.

[Related: OT Security: A Complete Guide to Protecting Operational Technology]

[Related: The Best Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity Companies in 2026]

[Related: The Best SLED Cybersecurity Companies in 2026]

Frequently Asked Questions About Smart City Cybersecurity Companies

What Is the Best Cybersecurity Company for Smart Cities?

The best fit depends on your program’s maturity. If all a city needs is basic device visibility or there are a very small number of assets to track and protect, nearly any platform will do. If it is also important to have prioritization based on real exploitability rather than severity scores, and segmentation that is simulated against observed traffic before it is enforced, Asimily covers all three in one platform with unified asset inventory normalization. Forescout, Ordr, Armis, and Claroty are common alternatives, and Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks extend network security into multi-site municipal facilities. Asimily excels at providing strong, normalized asset inventory data across IoT, OT, and IT using multiple methods, including AI, deep packet inspection, flow data analysis, and its database of well over 10,000,000 observed devices and profiles.

What Counts as a Smart City Device?

A smart city device is any connected device that municipal services depend on, including traffic cameras, signal controllers, building management systems, public safety equipment, and parking and lighting controllers, among many others. Different departments often own them, and many cannot run security agents, so protection starts with agentless discovery into one unified, normalized inventory of IoT, OT, and IT assets, regardless of which department owns them.

How Can a City Find Connected Devices on Remote Networks?

Combine passive monitoring where traffic can be mirrored with queries to the device or its management system where it cannot, and pull records from tools the city already runs. Asimily’s integrations use API-based querying to collect granular data from remote devices such as traffic cameras, beyond what SNMP walks and SPAN can provide.

How Should Cities Segment Traffic, Building, and Public Safety Systems?

Group devices by function and owner, test each policy against observed traffic, and enforce in stages, starting with the highest-risk groups. Asimily’s Policy Simulation does this against real traffic, and Continuous Segmentation keeps the NAC policies that Asimily manages current as matching devices are added or stop matching. Many cities still schedule major network changes for planned maintenance windows, and a long enough simulation can give department owners the confidence to switch a policy to enforcement sooner, reducing risk exposure windows.

What Guidance Exists for Smart City Cybersecurity?

In April 2023, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and agencies in the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand published Cybersecurity Best Practices for Smart Cities, covering segmentation, multifactor authentication, zero-trust design, and physical protection of sensors. They also emphasize that because smart cities gather vast amounts of data on all residents, protecting citizen privacy must be a primary design consideration. Often, general frameworks such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 provide a useful guide to the varied deployments that happen under smart city initiatives.

See How Asimily Protects Smart Cities

Asimily gives cities one unified, normalized asset inventory across IoT, OT, and IT, a short list of the exposures that are actually exploitable, and segmentation policy simulated against real traffic before it is enforced.

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