Tennant Company, founded in 1870, designs and manufactures industrial cleaning equipment - walk-behind and ride-on floor scrubbers, sweepers, and specialty machines. The attack surface here isn't trivial: the company now ships autonomous mobile robots and operates IRIS Asset Manager, a fleet management platform connecting machines across facilities worldwide. That means OT protocols, robotic firmware, cloud-connected telemetry, and a sprawling IoT footprint spanning North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia Pacific.
The threat model for a company at this intersection is concrete. Autonomous mobile robots running cleaning programs in commercial and industrial environments blend embedded systems security with operational technology concerns. IRIS Asset Manager, the fleet management system, aggregates data across deployments - exfiltration or tampering there could compromise operational integrity at scale. Patented technologies like ec-H2O NanoClean add proprietary R&D IP to the mix, making corporate espionage and supply chain integrity real vectors.
Securing Tennant's stack likely means working across multiple domains: firmware hardening for robotic platforms, cloud security for fleet telemetry, identity and access management for a globally distributed operation, and application security for both customer-facing and internal tooling. The company's push into sustainable, tech-forward cleaning solutions means the digital layer is only growing - and with it, the need for people who understand how physical systems and networked infrastructure actually converge.
