Swedish firm IAR Systems and its Secure Thingz subsidiary have announced a secure development and volume production platform to accelerate Microsoft Azure IoT migration.

The goal is to enabls high-volume secure device development and production, supporting automatic onboarding of devices and integration into Microsoft Azure cloud services.

With applications rapidly transitioning from traditional embedded devices to cloud-orientated edge compute nodes, there is a growing need to integrate cloud connectivity into both the development and manufacturing processes, creating a seamless secure supply chain.

This product benefits from popular commercial embedded development toolchains to integrate cloud-ready identity and robust root-of-trust technology, delivering a cloud-first offering.

The integration of the IAR Embedded Workbench development toolchain and the Embedded Trust security development tool, coupled with Microsoft’s cloud device provisioning services, ensures enterprises can deliver products that are cryptographically identifiable, with secured software installation, secure update management and secured production management.

The delivery of development-orientated security can ensure bad actors have no entry points into the development to deployment flow, protecting intellectual property, inhibiting malware and delivering trust in every connected device.

“It is only by designing for security and cloud connectivity at the inception of the development process that we can truly ensure protection of devices, intellectual property, customer data and software updates,” said Haydn Povey, chief strategy officer at IAR Systems. “Secure development and secure manufacturing of devices, coupled with tight integration of strong cryptographic identity and valet services to ensure OEM credentials are meshed securely into Microsoft’s Azure services, mean that cloud-first strategies are available to every developer and enterprise.”

Tony Shakib, general manager for Azure IoT at Microsoft, added: “Building with Microsoft Azure RTOS and being cloud ready delivers the Microsoft vision for connected devices. The ability to develop and deploy pre-onboarded devices which are implicitly cloud aware means everyone can rapidly connect devices to services and reduce time-to-data.”

Secure Thingz is a domain expert in device security, embedded systems and lifecycle management. In 2018, the company was acquired by IAR Systems. Secure Thingz is focused on delivering security into the emerging industrial IoT, critical infrastructure, automotive and other markets. The Secure Deploy architecture has been developed to solve the major security problems with the IoT. It ensures a cost-efficient root of trust in low-cost microcontrollers to deliver a core set of critical services through the product lifecycle, alongside secure deployment, production and update infrastructure.