See A Demo At The Show!
 

We’re at the 2nd Internet of Things India Expo in New Delhi this week at the beautiful Pragati Maidan (booth 7B7) demonstrating how NetFoundry answers three top IoT challenges without hardware or VPNs. In fact, people are initially skeptical when we tell them we can instantly connect IoT to fog, core, and cloud over any Internet connection, but it’s true, and the implications are more-than compelling.

iot india expo 2018 iot challenges iiot challenges appwanThe 2nd edition of the IoT India expo 2018 focuses on the entire IoT ecosystem, including governing bodies, hardware, software, and services. With smart cities, smart homes, smart infrastructure, smart wearable devices, autonomous and connected vehicles, and so much more, we’re witnessing an Internet far beyond desktops and mobile devices. This year’s show has a special focus on AR, VR, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Wearables, underlining the rapid change the Internet of Things is bringing across industries, and raising new challenges that must be overcome.

While each of our customers and partners approaches IoT and IIoT from very different perspectives, we have recognized three overarching IoT challenges that plague them all, and we’ve risen to the occasion to overcome them.

Security: The Biggest of the IoT Challenges

NetFoundry makes it possible to instantly connect IoT to fog, core, and cloud at scale over any Internet connection. We enable context-specific, micro-segmentation while eliminating the cost and complexity of traditional VPNs. Using our platform, administrators and partners can easily establish software-only, zero trust, identity-driven networks called AppWANs with application and device specificity at scale. IoT AppWANs are secure-by-design, leveraging software defined perimeter (SDP)architectures, least privilege access, and virtual network function (VNF) architectures to secure, protect, and isolate IoT app from attacks such as DDoS, Man-in-the-Middle, botnets, and spoofing.

NetFoundry’s unique relationships with hardware root of trust solutions such as Micron demonstrate the effectiveness and strength of NetFoundry’s software defined perimeter at meeting the most difficult of IoT challenges.

See A Demo At The Show!
 

IoT Challenge #2: Scalability

The NetFoundry platform is perfect for IoT solutions providers, integrators, IoT management software vendors, and device manufacturers. NetFoundry can be embedded in applications and devices themselves to ensure identity in even the most stringent compliance environments. NetFoundry provides zero-touch onboarding so that each IoT endpoint can be provisioned to automatically accesses network-wide services and resources based on defined policy with infinite scalability.

iot challenges integron iiot healthcare hipaa appwan netfoundry

Integron, a healthcare IoT leader managing over one million devices, selected NetFoundry to integrate into its healthcare IoT security strategy, ensuring the protection of personal medical data. The partnership allows Integron to embed the NetFoundry platform within their managed service solution, providing improved flexibility, configurability, and time-to-market control for IoT private networks, and IoT security for their deployments.

See A Demo At The Show!
 

IoT Challenge #3: Ubiquitous Connectivity

The issue of ubiquitous IoT connectivity is one we see on a regular basis working with our IoT customers and partners, and we recently teamed up with our friends in the Tata Communications MOVE division to tackle the problem.

Tata Communications’ MOVE provides seamless, low cost mobile connectivity that works everywhere. The platform is underpinned by Tata Communications’ global network and partnerships with 900+ mobile service providers across the globe and acts as the ubiquitous IoT connectivity side of our solution.

By combining the ubiquitous IoT connectivity offered by Tata’s MOVE platform with the network-agnostic, context-specific security of the NetFoundry platform, we are able to deliver a mobile, secure, end-to-end IoT solution.

In our initial proof of concept, we used Dell 3001 IoT gateways configured with mobile SIM/MOVE connectivity. The sensor data was collected by Raspberry PI connectors to said gateways. This configuration was used because of its potential to be found in real world use cases (think trucks, power generators, and any equipment that does not have a fixed permanent location). The data collection was handled by NodeRed flow engines that forwarded telemetry to the IoT platform.

netfoundry tata communications iot communications iot security iiot iot connectivity iot challenges iiot challenges

On the platform side, we chose a ThingWorx IoT Platform deployed in AWS cloud. This choice was primarily driven by Thingworx’s rapid development capabilities.

Tying things together was relatively simple.

First, we spun up a NetFoundry network control fabric instance through our web console. Next, we spun up Netfoundry Gateway in the same VPC as the ThingWorx platform using the AMI published in the AWS Marketplace.

Next, we installed a Netfoundry endpoint client on the Dell IoT gateway.

Then, we tied the gateway in AWS to the endpoint client on the Dell IoT gateway with an AppWAN. AppWANs are established when our orchestration tools are used to assign an endpoint or group of endpoints (which can be any combination of virtual gateways, virtual machines, IoT devices, smartphones, laptops, etc.) permission to access a service or set of services (typically an application) over our network control fabric. With the AppWAN in place, the IoT platform is completely protected from the public Internet, while still being able to harness its ubiquity. The only traffic that can reach it would be from the Netfoundry gateway.

We then configured the Dell IoT gateway to intercept telemetry traffic and forward it over the AppWAN.

Looking Ahead

Early in 2017, a vendor-neutral, open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation called EdgeX Foundry was launched. Their vision is to create a common interoperability framework that enables an ecosystem of plug-and-play, “EdgeX Certified” components. In other words, they’re developing standards to accelerate IIoT adoption by removing the pain points we discussed previously. NetFoundry became part of the community along with over 50 other EdgeX Foundry members shortly after its inception.

With demonstrated answers to top IoT challenges, and the foundational work of EdgeX Foundry, we’re excited about the future of IoT, IIoT, and our role in making the lives of IoT architects and businesses easier and more secure. Be sure to stop by booth 7B7 at IoT India Expo later this week to see how we’re reimagining IoT.

See A Demo At The Show!
 

Discuss On: