How to Secure Industrial IoT Devices Without Building Your Own Private Network From Scratch
Michael Crayton, National Sales Account Manager
Every remote sensor, safe, or SCADA endpoint you connect is a door. Leave it on the public internet with a static IP anyone can find, and you’ve left that door unlocked.
The good news is, enterprise-grade security doesn’t require ripping out your connectivity and building a private cellular network from scratch. It just comes down to adjusting how your current connections are set up.
That distinction — using what you already have versus building something brand new — is what the rest of this blog is about. It covers what’s actually at risk, what fixes it, and when a private network is worth it.
What are the biggest security risks in industrial IoT connectivity?
The three biggest risks are:
- Public static IPs exposed to the open internet
- Unmanaged carrier paths with no failover
- Zero visibility into what’s actually happening at the edge
Any one of those can turn a connectivity problem into a security incident in seconds.
A device on a public static IP can be found, fingerprinted, and probed by anyone scanning the internet. Add in unmanaged carrier relationships (one SIM, one network, no backup) and you’ve got single points of failure scattered across every remote site you operate. And if nobody’s watching the connection itself, you won’t know something’s wrong until the device goes dark — or worse, someone else finds it first.
These are real risks for industrial operations. Remote well pads, unattended equipment, and distributed device fleets are exactly the kind of environment where complete manual oversight and monitoring becomes nearly impossible.
How do you secure IoT devices without your own private cellular network?
Four things that can add security to your cellular network in this context:
- a private static IP
- a static IP that isn’t public
- an encrypted tunnel
- automatic multi-carrier failover
Applied to the connectivity you already have, these help eliminate the two biggest risks (internet-exposed devices and single-carrier outages) without private 5G cost or build time.
Each piece does a different job. The private APN and private static IP keep a device off the open internet. An encrypted tunnel protects whatever’s actually moving across that connection, and multi-carrier failover keeps the device reachable even if one network has an outage. While they can’t replace each other, they can work together to Solve different aspects of the same problem. We deploy all four together for our customers, so your connectivity isn’t left relying on just one layer.
We recently worked with a company running thousands of cash-handling devices like smart safes and recyclers. Every device across retail and restaurant locations nationwide sat on a public static IP, visible to anyone scanning for it, and every device was locked to whichever single carrier happened to reach that address. We pushed new eSIM profiles over the air, moved every device onto a private IP, and gave each one automatic access to all three major carriers instead of one. Here’s the full story →
Private Cellular Network vs. Secured Public Carrier: Which do you need?
If you need total control over spectrum and hardware on a single site — a manufacturing floor, a port, a facility where every device sits within one footprint — a private cellular network (PCN) can be worth the cost. If your devices are distributed across many remote sites, a secure private APN riding on a public carrier network and multi-network SIMs gets you comparable security at a fraction of the cost and timeline.
PCNs are excellent tools for the right job: dense, single-site deployments where you own the whole environment. But many industrial IoT sites are scattered: a well pad here, a compressor station there, a fleet of devices spread across a state or a country.
Building a private network environment at every one of those sites isn’t always practical or necessary. Private APNs and static IPs on top of public carrier infrastructure give you the same core outcome — traffic that isn’t sitting on the open internet — without a standalone network at every location.
Multi-network SIMs do more than fill coverage gaps. Carrier failover, private APNs, and SIM-level controls are becoming a security layer in their own right. See how multi-network SIMs can strengthen IoT security here →
How much does this actually improve your security day to day?
A device goes from discoverable by anyone scanning the open internet to invisible outside your own network, and from a single point of carrier failure to automatic failover across three. More than a smaller attack surface, that’s the removal of the two exposures that caused most of the risk in the first place.
You’ll feel it as you experience fewer incidents: no more patching an exposed IP after the fact, no more guessing whether a dark device is down or just unreachable, no more manual carrier troubleshooting when one network has an outage. Reliability and security stop being two separate projects, because the fix for one is the fix for the other. A device that’s always reachable through a private connection is both harder to compromise and harder to lose track of.
That’s why operators are doing this now, before it becomes forced by an incident. It costs less than a private network, deploys faster, and it’s already how the connectivity you’re paying for should be working.
If you’re running distributed devices on public static IPs, it’s worth a conversation with Solve before it becomes an incident report.
About the Author: Meet Michael Crayton
Michael Crayton, National Sales Account Manager
Michael Crayton leads enterprise sales at Solve Networks, working across oil & gas, energy, industrial automation, and digital signage — bringing on new accounts and working directly with router OEMs, system integrators, and other service providers to translate complex network requirements into carrier-agnostic solutions built on Solve’s Clarity™ platform. Before joining Solve in 2025, Michael spent over a decade at Industrial Networking Solutions, where he worked across OT/IT networking for mission-critical industrial applications — representing brands like Cisco, Sierra Wireless, Moxa, and Ericsson/Cradlepoint, and delivering network design, security consultation, and audit services for some of the most demanding environments in the industrial space.
