Companies that rely on various Internet-connected devices – think of industrial sensors on the production floor – may find it difficult to maintain all devices properly. But it is an extremely high priority. Microsoft is responding to this with the launch of the IoT Hub Device Streams.
The new platform was launched today by Microsoft and builds on the IoT Hub device management platform in Azure. System administrators can log on to a device that needs maintenance, without the company having to drop its firewall. The latter sometimes has to be done in order to be able to maintain the devices, but due to the design of Microsoft’s system this is not necessary. IoT Hub Device Streams regulates the Internet traffic via the existing network connection of the IoT device.
Extra secured
IoT devices can be accessed from service endpoints without having to open the firewall on the device or network, said Reza Sherafat, senior program manager at Microsoft Azure IoT. All they have to do is connect to IoT Hub cloudendpoints via port 443.
By using a direct connection, other advantages are also noticeable. The service encrypts all Internet traffic by default. It is also required that the systems on both sides of a connection authenticate themselves, which immediately provides an extra layer of security.
The fact that IoT Hub Device Streams makes connections on a point-to-point basis makes it even safer. This is because a system administrator can only access the device he is logged on to. The device can only interact with a small part of the cloud infrastructure. As a result, hackers have much less room to carry out their attacks.
According to Microsoft, the IoT Hub Device Streams will be able to help with a range of different situations. System administrators can use it to open a device’s diagnostic dashboard if something seems to go wrong. Finally, developers can retrieve the data and logs they need for their software projects.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.