The Internet of Things (IoT) is providing breakthrough value to businesses across every vertical, from manufacturing, to energy, to agriculture, to real estate, to healthcare and more. IoT provides real-time insights into assets, enabling businesses to reduce operational expenses, unplanned downtime and unnecessary servicing.
While the benefits of IoT are well established and significant, one of the biggest hurdles for customers is securing IoT devices – both for new digitization initiatives as well as for legacy Operational Technology and industrial control system environments. Two years ago, Microsoft announced a $5 billion investment in IoT to further our commitment to build a trusted, easy-to-use platform for our customers and partners to build connected solutions – no matter where they are starting in their IoT journey.
Microsoft already provides multi-layer IoT security and IoT security monitoring in Azure, which is being used by thousands of customers in production and has made securely configuring IoT devices possible. And while securely configuring IoT devices is possible, our mission is to simplify IoT and make securing IoT devices easy.
Yet there are still challenges customers have that we seek to solve:
- Giving customers visibility into what IoT devices are already connected to their networks.
- Managing the security on existing IoT devices (referred to as “brownfield devices”) that have been historically difficult due to a myriad of custom protocols.
Today we are excited to share that Microsoft is acquiring CyberX to help solve these challenges. CyberX will complement the existing Azure IoT security capabilities, and extends to existing devices including those used in industrial IoT, Operational Technology and infrastructure scenarios. With CyberX, customers can discover their existing IoT assets, and both manage and improve the security posture of those devices. With CyberX, customers can see a digital map of thousands of devices across a factory floor or within a building and gather information about their asset profile and vulnerabilities. Gaining this visibility is not only critical for understanding where security risks may exist and then mitigating those risks, but it is also a fundamental step to securely enable smart manufacturing, smart grid and other digitization use cases across production facilities and the supply chain.
And while Microsoft is adding CyberX to our security capabilities, our partnerships with the broad set of security providers in the ecosystem is more important than ever, with many of them providing on-the-ground expertise and integration services.
We will continue to deliver more value to our customers as CyberX is further integrated with Microsoft’s broad portfolio of IoT security offerings in threat protection that span users, endpoints, applications, data and more. For example, in conjunction with Azure Sentinel, Microsoft’s cloud-native, next-generation security information and event management (SIEM)/security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) with built-in IoT security workload, SecOps personnel will be able to identify threats that span Operational Technology- and IT-converged networks that were previously challenging to detect.
We know that customers need help improving the security of their existing IoT environment. CyberX’s technology and team will be an incredible addition to Microsoft in our commitment to both IoT security and innovation as you work to digitally transform your business.
