The EdgeX Foundry community is comprised of a diverse set of member companies that represent the IoT ecosystem. The Member Spotlight blog series highlights these members and how they are contributing to and leveraging open source solutions. Today, we sat down with Roman Arutyunov, Co-Founder and VP of Products for Xage Security, Inc. to discuss Industry 4.0, challenges for edge computing, security and digital twins for machines.
What does your company do?
Xage is the first and only blockchain-protected security platform for industrial IoT, creating a tamper-proof “fabric” for communication, authentication, and trust that assures security at scale. Our platform supports any-to-any communication, secures user-based and machine-to-machine access to existing industrial systems, works at the edge even with irregular connectivity, and gets stronger and stronger with every device added to the network. Customers include leaders in the largest industries, spanning energy, utilities, transportation and manufacturing.
Why is your company investing in the IoT ecosystem?
Industry 4.0 promises to bring the next big wave of economic growth, optimizing production and customer experience. As a team of security, industrial digitization, and software experts, we knew security would be foundational to such an autonomous, any-to-any, edge-heavy ecosystem. The current centralized security systems simply aren’t designed to handle the scope, nature or complexity of Industry 4.0. We saw the opportunity to build a security fabric that is distributed, redundant, flexible, and adaptive enough to provide the necessary trust and integrity for secure Industry 4.0 interactions at scale.
How has IoT impacted your company? What benefits have you seen or what do you expect to achieve?
Our goal is to become the foundational and enabling security layer for IoT security across the major, evolving industries that need it––like manufacturing, transportation, utilities, and energy, among others. IoT has already had a large impact on industrial verticals ranging from robotics in manufacturing, connected cars in transportation, and integration of renewable energy sources like solar and wind in utilities. Data-driven autonomous operation with distributed intelligence is a common theme across multiple industrial verticals and has the promise of enabling significant improvement in service reliability, efficiency, and sustainability affecting our everyday lives.
Businesses currently have to invest a lot of time and energy into developing their own edge computing solutions. What are some of the business or technical challenges you have faced when adopting edge computing technologies?
When developing edge computing solutions businesses typically face the challenge of having to deal with multiple data and control protocols, building adapters for each, and creating a data store on top of which analytics solutions can be run. Additionally, as data is exchanged and accessed by multiple applications there is a need for effective access control. The Xage Security Fabric addresses the security concerns for data storage and access across multiple distributed systems and applications at the edge.
Why did your company join EdgeX Foundry?
EdgeX Foundry and Xage are aligned in our objectives to build a converged and secure solution, spanning multiple vendors, devices, and applications for industrial IoT at the edge. There’s massive potential to transform the way industrial organizations operate, and joining the EdgeX Foundry brings us one step closer to the reality of Industry 4.0, operating efficiently and securely at the edge.
How are you going to use the framework?
Xage has created a decentralized framework for securing IoT devices, applications, and and enabling any-to-any information exchange. The Xage Security Suite enables access control at the edge enabling zero-touch device enrollment, one-click user access control, and peer-to-peer application data exchange. Even before we became a member of EdgeX Foundry – we had been working with the framework. We plan to make our Security Suite accessible through EdgeX.
Where do you see enterprise and industrial IoT in 20 years?
Two decades is a very long time in technology’s terms – just think about what your cell phone looked like 20 years ago. Actually, most people used pagers back then! In 20 years, IoT will move well beyond connectivity and data, and will be a well-integrated part of our lives. Through the spread of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, we will invent “digital twins” for machines that currently power our industries, and learn to interact with them for joint machine and human decision making.
What is your favorite connected device?
I love cars, connected cars and autonomous cars. It has a been a passion of mine for some time now. One of the first connected and autonomous cars has been implemented in open-pit mining. Think large Caterpillar trucks the size of a 2-story house driving themselves.
