Accelerating innovation: Start with Azure Sphere to secure IoT solutions

From agriculture to healthcare, IoT unlocks opportunity across every industry, delivering profound returns, such as increased productivity and efficiency, reduced costs, and even new business models. And with a projected 41.6 billion IoT connected devices by 2025, momentum continues to build.

While IoT creates new opportunities, it also brings new cybersecurity challenges that could potentially result in stolen IP, loss of brand trust, downtime, and privacy breaches. In fact, 97 percent of enterprises rightfully call out security as a key concern when adopting IoT. But when organizations have a reliable foundation of security on which they can build from the start, they can realize durable innovation for their business versus having to figure out what IoT device security requires and how to achieve it.

Read on to learn how you can use Azure Sphere—now generally available—to create and accelerate secure IoT solutions for both new devices and existing equipment. As you look to transform your business, discover why IoT security is so important to build in from the start and see how the integration of Azure Sphere has enabled other companies to focus on innovation. For a more in-depth discussion, be sure to watch the Azure Sphere general availability webinar.

Defense in depth, silicon-to-cloud security

It’s important to understand on a high level how Azure Sphere delivers quick and cost-effective device security. Azure Sphere is designed around the seven properties of highly secure devices and builds on decades of Microsoft experience in delivering secure solutions. End-to-end security is baked into the core, spanning the hardware, operating system, and cloud, with ongoing service updates to keep everything current.

While other IoT device platforms must rely on costly manual practices to mitigate missing security properties and protect devices from evolving cybersecurity threats, Azure Sphere delivers defense-in-depth to guard against and respond to threats. Add in ongoing security and OS updates to help ensure security over time, and you have the tools you need to stay on top of the shifting digital landscape.

Propel innovation on a secure foundation

Azure Sphere removes the complexity of securing IoT devices and provides a secure foundation to build on. This means that IoT adopters spend less time and money focused on security and more time innovating solutions that solve key business problems, delivering a greater return on investment as well as faster time to market.

Connected coffee with Azure Sphere 

A great example is Starbucks, who partnered with Microsoft to connect its fleet of coffee machines using the guardian module with Azure Sphere. The guardian module helps businesses quickly securely connect existing equipment without any redesign, saving both time and money.

With IoT-enabled coffee machines, Starbucks collects more than a dozen data points such as type of beans, temperature, and water quality for every shot of espresso. They are also able to perform proactive maintenance on the machines to avoid costly breakdowns and service calls. Finally, they are using the solution to transmit new recipes directly to the machines, eliminating manual processes and reducing costs.

Azure Sphere innovation within Microsoft

Here at Microsoft, Azure Sphere is also being used by the cloud operations team in their own datacenters. With the aim of providing safe, fast and reliable cloud infrastructure to everyone, everywhere, it was an engineer’s discovery of Azure Sphere that started to make their goal of connecting the critical environment systems—the walls, the roof, the electrical system, and mechanical systems that house the datacenters—a reality.

Using the guardian module with Azure Sphere, they were able to move to a predictive maintenance model and better prevent issues from impacting servers and customers. Ultimately it is allowing them to deliver better outcomes for customers and utilize the datacenter more efficiently. And even better, Azure Sphere is giving them the freedom to innovate, create and explore—all on a secure, cost-effective platform.

Partner collaborations broaden opportunities

Throughout it all, enabling this innovation, is our global ecosystem of Microsoft partners that enable us to advance capabilities and bring Azure Sphere to a broad range of customers and applications.

Together, we can provide a more extensive range of options for businesses—from the single chip Wi-Fi solution from MediaTek that meets more traditional needs to other upcoming solutions from NXP and Qualcomm. NXP will provide an Azure Sphere certified chip that is optimized for performance power, and Qualcomm will offer the first cellular-native Azure Sphere chip.

Register today

Register for the Azure Sphere general availability webinar to explore how Azure Sphere works, how businesses are benefiting from it, and how you can use Azure Sphere to create secure, trustworthy IoT devices that enable true business transformation.

Source: Azure Blog Feed