IoTium, a secure network infrastructure company for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), announced this week general availability of its Network as a Service (NaaS) offering, securely connecting legacy onsite systems in mission-critical environments to accelerate the deployment of Industry 4.0 at scale. Also announced today, IoTium closed an $8.4M Series A funding round led by March Capital Partners and GE Ventures.
IoTium understands that the creation of secure, scalable IIoT connections is a critical business challenge that industrial organizations cannot easily overcome on their own. The challenge lies in how to truly digitize “brownfield” or legacy onsite industrial environments that were not designed to be connected to the cloud. They must be digitized in a way that can scale to large and diverse industrial needs while also protecting the sensitive information transmitted. Security and scalability are paramount.
“IIoT has the power to transform industries. However, the promise of IIoT in mission critical environments such as building and industrial automation, oil and gas, manufacturing, transportation and the smart city industries has yet to be realized,” said Ron Victor, founder and CEO of IoTium. “The key issues facing these industrial environments in the adoption of IIoT are deployment complexities and security. IoTium’s highly secure solution enables these industrial environments to easily connect their legacy control and automation systems to greenfield applications in public, private and hybrid clouds or datacenters, without sacrificing security, something mission-critical environments just can’t compromise on.”
The company’s unique NaaS offering solves the fundamental industrial connectivity problem of “brownfield” environments embracing software defined networking for the promise of the IIoT, and thus helping industrial organizations to achieve secure remote connectivity at scale, through IoTium eliminates the need for onsite technicians or costly truck-rolls, CLIs, usernames and passwords, or changes to enterprise proxy and firewall policies; delivers embedding security in every layer of the IIoT stack, IoTium uses encryption and abstraction to secure both the assets and data, in motion and at rest, isolating every single data stream.
IoTium also provides visibility to all devices connected to a company’s IIoT network, enabling organizations to ensure that everything on the network is authorized to be there. The solution deploys analytics at the edge of network, accelerating the adoption of machine learning and artificial intelligence; and its architecture supports the software change management process through multiple levels of authentication at scale. As a result, industrial environments can transform the way business is done, realizing the full benefits of Industry 4.0 through better analytics, preventative maintenance and greater production efficiency.
Until now, deployment complexity and security concerns have caused a widespread lag in the adoption of IIoT. Traditional Information Technology (IT) methodologies involving command line interfaces (CLIs), usernames and passwords; changes to enterprise proxy and firewall policies; are not conducive to deployment at scale in the realm of the Operations Technology (OT) professionals tasked with the care and maintenance of traditionally closed industrial systems. Industrial IoT requires connecting air gapped, unconnected, mission critical control and automation systems to applications that reside in public, private and hybrid cloud.
“When it comes to realizing the promise of the IIoT to improve performance of equipment systems, security and simplicity are critical,” said John Petze, Principal at SkyFoundry. “With our SkySpark® Analytics software running on IoTium’s NaaS solution, customers benefit from secure connectivity and easily deployment of software across distributed computing systems that connect to the equipment systems from the edge to the enterprise level. The IIoT creates tremendous opportunity to generate value from device data. Analytics are key to maximizing ROI in factory environments.”
“Many companies are missing out on the opportunities, efficiencies and ROI that come with IIoT networks because they hit deployment complexities and security roadblocks when trying to adapt IT-centric approaches or create their own in-house solutions,” said Harry Pascarella, Consultant at Harbor Research. “Industry 4.0 holds a lot of promise for these businesses, however, they shouldn’t apply IT thinking to OT problems, or try to do this alone and hope that it just works. The industry has needed an approach that circumvents these issues and allows even the largest organizations to rapidly digitize their businesses for secure, remote connectivity and applications at the edge.”
