Mender, an open-source, over-the-air (OTA) software updater for connected IoT devices, recently announced the launch of Hosted Mender, a software as a service (SaaS) enabling automated OTA software updates to IoT devices.

The Mender team plans to address this critical security requirement to allow embedded systems to connect to the Internet and receive software updates in order to fix bugs, patch security vulnerabilities, and receive new features.

Other key capabilities include automatic rollback in case the update doesn’t take for any reason - including power loss or poor network mid-update - which can brick a device and make it completely unusable.

The projected scale of IoT growth is massive, but there are clear roadblocks for wide adoption. A top concern for many organizations is securing their smart devices given the increasingly regular news coverage of data breaches and device compromise. Adding more intelligence to these smart devices also means more advanced software, which explains the increased adoption to Linux-based embedded systems.

Hosted Mender provides an inexpensive, on-demand OTA solution with the ability to secure field-deployed devices with minimal risk of device bricking through automated rollback, secure communication protocols, code signing, proper authentication, reporting and dashboards for real-time visibility into the health of the entire device fleet. And with a hosted management server, device manufacturers get rapid time-to-value in end-to-end OTA management.

eletter-05-18-2018