Onboarding the Billions - Tackling the Next Wave of IoT Devices

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem is often seen as a turbulent yet quite lucrative opportunity, and organizations strive to secure a foothold. Given the plethora of ever-increasing verticals that need to be addressed and the use case scenarios that populate new business ventures in this greatly fragmented market, the focus has mostly been on maximizing an organization’s current potential, adopting new technologies rapidly, and finding an organization’s place in the market among dozens of high- and low-profile rivals.

However, there is one crucial element that has eluded attention recently that is slowly being brought into the spotlight: IoT device onboarding processes. More specifically, how can companies hope to onboard these billions of things coming online in the next five years?

IoT device onboarding refers to the process of adding a thing (e.g., sensor, device, gateway, actuator, etc.) onto to a cloud service or IoT management platform once that device “wakes up” (i.e., is connected) for the first time, in a secure, uninterruptable manner that takes into account device credentials and crypto-processes as a means of managing and tying that device into a larger IoT connected fleet and under certain

Application Enablement Platforms (AEPs).

For the past years, cloud computing leaders like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure were expected to do most of the heavy lifting by providing overarching Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)/Platform as a Service (PaaS)/Software as a Service (SaaS) type platforms that companies could tap into and secure their access into state-of-the-art cloud computing power, custom-fit to their organization’s needs. Secure device onboarding, however, is an entirely different beast, requiring companies to delve much deeper into the supply chain of trust in order to produce accurate results.

What certain vendors fail to address is actual need for speed when it comes to IoT onboarding practices. In an ecosystem that is forecast to stretch into tens of billions within the next five years and where scalability is still an ever-present obstacle for IoT platforms, there is very little room for “manual” tasks. With manual thing onboarding times ranging from 2.5 minutes to 20 minutes and above, the future needs will revolve around an effective and efficient way to automate these processes.

A perfect example of this turning point currently revolves around Intel’s Secure Device Onboard (SDO) and Enhanced Privacy ID (EPID) offering suite. As a silicon innovator with its new SDO, Intel is leading the charge into true zero-touch autonomous processes, boasting a vast ecosystem of support; hardware Root of Trust (RoT) and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to safeguard device ID; network, communication, and data security; as well as a robust process of transferring device security credentials across the supply chain.

However, automating the onboarding process of these billions of IoT devices coming online is not only quite challenging in itself but also heavily dependent upon a vendors’ partnership environment, with cloud, software, and hardware support as well as forming a supply chain of trust.

This includes everything from managing device credentials injected into secure hardware elements during the manufacturing phase, adding PKI encryption, changing device ownership, adding lifecycle management, commissioning and decommissioning when needed, all the way to coordinating with Certificate Authorities (CAs), Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), silicon vendors, and cloud platform players across the entire value chain while still being able to tap into advanced data analytics and other related services like network management and predictive maintenance. 

While Intel entered the fray with a truly impressive suite, other competitors are building their own solutions addressing different market needs with different strategies: ARM is constantly working on improving Mbed Cloud, which also automatically enrolls devices when they are initially connected; Rambus and Microchip are giving emphasis to the security side of IoT from a software and hardware, respectively; and finally, Microsoft Azure and AWS are still the cloud computing leaders, with a wide reach and strategies that are hinting toward more automation services within a few years.