Microsoft Azure today announced Azure Security Center for IoT, which provides hybrid cloud security management and threat protection capabilities to help its manufacturing customers monitor the security status of their Azure-connected Internet of Things devices used in industrial applications.
The cloud provider’s latest offering is designed in a way so as to grease the wheels for their partners and customers and build enterprise-grade industrial IoT solutions with open standards and ensure their security.
“They want security more integrated into every layer, protecting data from different industrial processes and operations from the edge to the cloud,” Sam George, Microsoft Azure’s IoT director, said in a blog post yesterday. “They want to enable proofs-of-concept quickly to improve the pace of innovation and learning, and then to scale quickly and effectively. And they want to manage digital assets at scale, not dozens of devices and sensors.”
While some cloud providers address pieces of this puzzle, Azure is the world’s first cloud offering to deliver “an end-to-end, unified approach to IoT security,” according to Caglayan Arkan, Microsoft’s global head of manufacturing and resources industry.
Microsoft Azure said it sources threat intelligence from the 6 trillion-plus signals that Microsoft collects daily and provides that information in the security center, which integrates with Azure IoT Hub to provide IoT security information inside the portal.
“The Microsoft Azure IoT Security solution provides us with management and threat protection for the full stack, including IoT devices, IoT hubs as well as the computing and data resources utilized by our solutions, effectively saving us from ‘rolling our own’ and aligning our IoT security neatly with our other Azure-based solutions and line-of-business application usage,” Garth Beaumont, Volpara’s chief information security officer, said in a statement.
Microsoft Azure also rolled out OPC Twin and OPC Vault as part of its Azure Industrial IoT Cloud Platform. OPC Twin creates a digital twin of manufacturers’. OPC Twin creates a digital twin of manufacturers’ OPC unified architecture-enabled machines and makes the information model of that specific machine available in the cloud, while OPC Vault’s function is to automate security management by creating, managing and revoking certificates for OPC UA-enabled machines on a global scale.