Developers of the Internet of Things always seems to be moving into the last big thing—at least as far as communications expectations and protocols. Too often security is an afterthought, something that can be bolted on afterward.
I often have to design secure communications for new deployments on a University campus. Many new roll-pits are still using RESTfull JSON. Remote systems often transfer telemetry to the cloud using unencrypted FTP. OpenADR generally uses reverse polling because corporate security won’t let…
Read MoreA recent conversation about European power markets and some “glitches” in early June shown a light on profound issues in cybersecurity, in system architectures for big infrastructure, and to an extent the scalability problems with many of the hottest applications for the Internet of Things (IOT).
The specific observations was a plea for direct central control, even as it used an example that showed the shortcoming of infrastructure architecture based on assumptions of central control. It then learned the wrong lesson, that spontaneous order is too “risky” at large scale.
Read MoreFor decades, from even before we called everything the IoT (Internet of Things), maintenance has been the barrier to digital sensing and operating of the physical world. Wired sensors were reliable, but expensive to install, and often an esthetic nightmare once installed. With self-power, sensors became cheap enough to put everywhere, but faced a new challenge—intelligence maintenance.
Read MoreRecently, a friend asked me to explain fog computing. Is it different than cloud computing?
The term Cloud in an architectural diagram, as originally used, meant “it doesn’t matter where the computing is”, i.e., the term Cloud meant vague and undefined. As happens so often, a few big data center operators (you know their names) re-defined it to mean “in our far-away high-up location”. This definition supports their marketing but restricts the original purpose of the term.
Fog is taking back the cloud...
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