With a mission to address some of the hardest challenges associated with scaling IoT implementations – security, fragmentation, complexity and related economics – a new edge computing software company, embedding distributed ledger approaches into solutions support widespread Industrial IoT (IIoT), came out of stealth mode at the IoT Evolution Expo.
IronBridge Enterprise, a start-up based in Austin, Texas, introduced an Internet service layer that unifies security of smart devices, cloud services, edge services, and digital assets, enabling next generation distributed applications and services.
“We chose this industry event, which we’ve been attending for years, in large part because of their natural expansion into blockchain,” founder and CEO Michael Hathaway said in an interview this morning. “While there are many valuable enterprise applications that are using distributed ledger technologies to enhance and even replace outdated and expensive data integrity and network management systems, we’ve seen the most exciting use cases in the world of connected things.”
Hathaway said the reason for this is clear – the growth of edge devices, all generating data locally (at the edge) and sending that data to the cloud for certain processing – requires more practical approaches that support any device, any access network, any gateway, transmission network, cloud and application, avoiding complication and locked-in vendor agreements that have slowed adoption.
“The POCs for years have proven successful, but when enterprises need to scale to support tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of end points, the business models fall apart,” Hathaway said. “We’ve worked for several years on the underlying platform supporting our solutions, and our customers’ solutions when we partner with them, and it’s a perfect time for us to emerge and share what we are doing in the energy and healthcare industries with a combination of IoT and software development experience that takes advantage of blockchain architecture.”
The company is providing secure, blockchain enabled, edge computing solutions to enterprise customers, with focused on addressing data integrity and cybersecurity challenges.
The edge computing market is growing at a 41% CAGR and is expected to reach $3.2B by 2025, according to industry analysts, in parallel with growth in IoT and AI, the latter which IronBridge is using to support autonomous systems and predictive features within those systems.
Leveraging Cognida, an open source platform which was introduced last year, IronBridge is building Data Security as a Service (DSaaS) solutions proven at the edge in healthcare, distributed energy generation, distributed control systems including legacy automation, smart city and region applications and agriculture.
IronBridge incorporates the Cognida cybersecurity framework into custom edge applications for enterprise customers and offers network services for managing digital identities, assets and distributed, edge applications. A new white paper is available to view here.
“We will be announcing a number of specific projects underway over the next few months,” said Michael Hathaway, founder and CEO. “We are very fortunate to be innovating with our customers and partners, together creating a new path for IT and OT systems development and management.”
Hathaway will be addressing the audience as part of a blockchain certification event and will be specifically addressing the relationship of blockchain and IoT, particularly as edge challenges mount, including cost-efficient and effective security concerns.
IronBridge is partnering with OneLedger, TSAV and Sphereon, the details about which Hathaway said will be shared in the coming weeks.
“Conventional cloud approaches and enterprise infrastructure don’t address edge computing administration and security challenges,” Hathaway said. “This new data and computing landscape requires adoption of new technologies and services and has spawned the high growth edge computing technology market, driving the need to implement distributed edge computing applications that securely share data without trusted centralized services.”
This emerging edge computing industry is a high growth and dynamic sector, which according to Grand View Research, is growing at a 41% CAGR and is expected to reach $3.2B by 2025 across multiple industry sectors.
Arti Loftus is an experienced Information Technology specialist with a demonstrated history of working in the research, writing, and editing industry with many published articles under her belt.Edited by
Ken Briodagh
