Simplified and secured IoT device management

In order to take full advantage of the benefits of an internet of things (IoT) application, the IoT device manufacturer has to overcome a number of challenges. This includes connecting and maintaining increasingly complex devices, managing fragmented IoT device hardware and software, avoiding commonplace ecosystem IoT platform lock-in and ensuring that each device can communicate securely.

To solve these challenges, Nexus, Software AG and a range of industry experts are contributing to the open-source thin-edge.io project - the first open edge framework for lightweight IoT devices. This project provides a cloud-agnostic IoT framework that can be easily deployed on a wide range of PLCs, protocol gateways and other IoT devices using Linux-based operation systems.

Connecting IoT devices, analyzing and visualizing IoT device collected data, integrating the IoT application into existing enterprise applications, OT systems and cloud services and building and deploying data-driven applications is facilitated by the open framework.

Nexus is making industry-standard security functionality available to the IoT device developers to easily adopt without extensive knowledge about PKI and certificates. By using the PKI functionality, the IoT device is qualified for use in a secure IoT ecosystem as its authenticity can then be guaranteed and its transmitted data can be trusted and also encrypted if required by the IoT application. These features, enabled by PKI, constitute the foundation for trusted and secure communication and makes the IoT application resistant to cybersecurity attacks.

thin-edge.io provides advanced device management functionality and is deployable onto most embedded hardware platforms, operating systems and software containers and has very limited CPU usage and memory footprint that minimizes impact on constrained IoT devices. It offers great freedom of choice supporting any programming language and messaging and with out-of-the-box connectivity to many IoT platforms including Azure IoT, Cumulocity IoT and others, and to Certificate Authorities like Nexus GO IoT for PKI certificate lifecycle management.