Secure & robust Over-the-Air software updates for embedded IoT devices
Did you know 8.5% of enterprise IoT devices could fail over three years without robust and secure software updates?
Over-the-air (OTA) software updates are the most critical in the entire IoT device management lifecycle. A Microsoft research report cites security and scalability in the top five challenges in IoT adoption and highlights efficiency and productivity as the key motivators for why companies adopt IoT. You need an OTA software update solution that puts both security and scalability at the center of its engineering design.
Continuing to develop your own homegrown OTA software updates solution for embedded devices can mean adding great complexity and cost to your product development. If you do build an OTA software updates solution in-house, you could jeopardize time-to-market, and take away focus by spending your precious resources on something that is not core to your company and product competencies. An expert at Gunnebo Security Solutions advises going for a Best-of-Breed technology partner to handle OTA software updates as the prudent and strategic choice. Put your faith in Mender where the engineering team has spent over 5 years solving the hard problems in this area.
Mender Enterprise is an end-to-end secure, risk tolerant and efficient over-the-air (OTA) software update management solution with capabilities to expand beyond OTA and provide customers with optional device management add-on features who may need the extras for more effective and efficient management of their device fleet.
Mender brings value to your company by:
- Reducing business liability and risks by focusing on security and robustness at large scale;
- Minimizing costs by reducing labor intensive tasks in the management of devices and software;
- Increasing efficiency through automation of OTA software updates;
Deliver
Updates |
Reduce
Costs |
Deploy
Globally |
Customize
Processes |
Mitigate
Risks |
Monetize
Offerings |
What makes Mender different?
The technical advantages of using Mender for OTA software updates
The technical advantages of using Mender for OTA software updates
How is Mender used in different industries?
Mender has been deployed in many different industries, and praised for its high level of configurability. Here are just three examples from Mender Enterprise customers Vaillant, Schindler Digital Group and Starry.
Heating, cooling and hot water products provider Vaillant needed secure system OTA software updates for the IoT devices that would enable their home customers to control their heating and power systems and for the service technicians to do better predictive maintenance in their next generation digital products. The Vaillant End User IOT product team wanted to focus on their core task of building great digital products for their customers and partner with Mender as a best-of-breed technology provider to handle all the complexity of the device system and application updates including end to end security for both the software and the hardware. Mender also works seamlessly with Microsoft Azure IoT as the IoT platform and NXP as the hardware provider for security encryption which was also very important for Vaillant.
“I can easily and quickly interact with the CTO and the Mender Product team and am able to influence the roadmap with the problems we need solved. This is a vital check mark from my side. We want to focus on the use cases around providing a great user experience for the customer. And not spend much time, energy, and resources working on infrastructure: This is why we work with Mender and Microsoft Azure IoT and all of this is strategically aligned. ”
- Kai Pecka, End User IoT Product Manager, Vaillant Group
“I can easily and quickly interact with the CTO and the Mender Product team and am able to influence the roadmap with the problems we need solved. This is a vital check mark from my side. We want to focus on the use cases around providing a great user experience for the customer. And not spend much time, energy, and resources working on infrastructure: This is why we work with Mender and Microsoft Azure IoT and all of this is strategically aligned. ”
- Kai Pecka, End User IoT Product Manager, Vaillant Group
Movement solutions provider Schindler Digital Group is using Mender to provide secure OTA software updates to its large fleets of gateway devices controlling its escalators and elevators in North America. Schindler is adding smartness to their global fleet of elevators and escalators. In this way, the company gets key insights from a continuous stream of IoT data. These insights can help it optimise equipment maintenance and improve the services they can offer to the passengers on their elevators and escalators. Schindler made the smart strategic move to find a best of breed partner in Mender to provide the over-the-air software updates capability. The company was looking for a technology partner that could reliably deliver the service, and hide the sheer complexity of OTA software updating behind the scenes, shielding the business from it.
“We were looking for a technology partner that could reliably deliver the service, and hide the sheer complexity of OTA software updating behind the scenes and shield the business from this complexity.”
- Andreas Heid, Head of Edge Technology & Device Management
“We were looking for a technology partner that could reliably deliver the service, and hide the sheer complexity of OTA software updating behind the scenes and shield the business from this complexity.”
- Andreas Heid, Head of Edge Technology & Device Management
Internet Service Provider Starry needed a flexible and straightforward OTA software updates solution that would allow them to save on bandwidth and cost by only delivering the fraction of the delta of an update to embedded devices in their large fleet. The company also needed a high degree of control by being able to schedule updates and to be able to do dynamic deployments to enable updates after the device boots up for the first time. This is important if there is a lengthy time period between the device leaving the manufacturer and the consumer using it for the first time. Mender was the “perfect” solution for their needs.
Other World Class organizations that have selected Mender as their IoT solution
“Our product organization has new firmware and code changes coming out every day and we need to get these updates to the customer devices as quickly and as securely as possible. Mender also has great flexibility that opens up new possibilities. We use it to update our Linux containers and we use it for component testing. It helps us make really fast proof of concepts using the Mender Client update modules.”
- Bjorn Nostdahl, Chief Product & Innovation Officer, Gunnebo Security Solutions
“Mender provides reliable OTA updates and critical atomic updates as the vehicles with our battery systems can be disconnected from power. We get great flexibility in the way we can build our own software images for Yocto OS. We can securely update an offline system. We have a range of systems that can go offline so it’s critical that the service team can get a USB key with a Mender artefact signed and update a system like that. Mender also offers an API or interface to provide a new image code signed to the device locally, so there is no need to switch to the developer mode without code signing which could be insecure.”
- Nicholas Grilly, IOT Product Manager, Northvolt
“Mender helped get OTA software updates to market quickly. We had it working within a week. It’s an OTA updates solution with great support. It offers excellent support for Yocto builds and interaction with U-Boot. In a project we chose Mender over 4 other options, we couldn’t get the others to work! Another key thing with Mender is the delta updates. The image we are sending to the lorry ICU devices are 200 to 300 mbytes in size, and over a cellular network, this would be very slow over cellular and cost a fortune without having the ability to use deltas to reduce the file updates size.”
- Jonathan Wilkinson, IoT Consultant, i-bee Technical Advisory Ltd
- Bjorn Nostdahl, Chief Product & Innovation Officer, Gunnebo Security Solutions
“Mender provides reliable OTA updates and critical atomic updates as the vehicles with our battery systems can be disconnected from power. We get great flexibility in the way we can build our own software images for Yocto OS. We can securely update an offline system. We have a range of systems that can go offline so it’s critical that the service team can get a USB key with a Mender artefact signed and update a system like that. Mender also offers an API or interface to provide a new image code signed to the device locally, so there is no need to switch to the developer mode without code signing which could be insecure.”
- Nicholas Grilly, IOT Product Manager, Northvolt
“Mender helped get OTA software updates to market quickly. We had it working within a week. It’s an OTA updates solution with great support. It offers excellent support for Yocto builds and interaction with U-Boot. In a project we chose Mender over 4 other options, we couldn’t get the others to work! Another key thing with Mender is the delta updates. The image we are sending to the lorry ICU devices are 200 to 300 mbytes in size, and over a cellular network, this would be very slow over cellular and cost a fortune without having the ability to use deltas to reduce the file updates size.”
- Jonathan Wilkinson, IoT Consultant, i-bee Technical Advisory Ltd
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Source : https://www.devicechronicle.com