Enable IoT Solutions with Windows 10 IoT Platform

Speakers: Adi Hariharan (Group Marketing Manager Windows IoT) and Jimmy Chen (Senior Consultant PDS Sales – IoT)

This is an introduction to IoT.

Cuts Across Industries

You cannot avoid IoT. It is spreading everywhere in all parts of life. Manufacturing, smart cities, transportation, retail, healthcare, energy, public safety, and agriculture according to the slide. But it’s in real life too … fridges, TVs, ambient devices, etc. IoT is one of the methods of Digital Transformation.

IoT is not new and it is complex, but Microsoft is trying to make it easier. Integrate the technology into the device (intelligent edge), and use the power of cloud to gather data, filter/process it, and make use of it (intelligent cloud).

Why Choose Windows IoT

MS has been in the embedded business for over 20 years. Lots of competition: Linux, Wind, Ubuntu, AndroidTGhings, raspberry, redhat, ARMmbed, Riot, Tizen. Windows is mature. It can get to market faster, has security built in, is deisgned for the intelligent edge.

Solution Journey

1. Build
2. Connect
3. Scale
4. Operate

Build

Jimmy Chen takes over.

Building IoT devices isn’t that easy. “Building a device is as easy as building an app” – not really, but that is the aspiration. Build on Windows, using familiar tools (Visual Studio) and managing it using familiar tools. Things like speech, touch, and ink are embedded.

Visual Studio: C#, HTML/JS/ C++ and more. One Dev Center for pulling back device information. Legacy applications can work on most editions of Windows.

Using Windows IoT embedded, then drivers/firmware are easier. You use the system features and APIs to use the hardware, and use background services for long running tasks. Specialized hardware still requires drivers, but this isn’t that common.

Windows 10 IoT innovations:

• New SoCs, including Raspberry Pi 3.
• Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning
• Azure IoT Hub Device Management
• Project “Rome” remove device management
• New controls and embedded features, standby, on-SOC PWM, NFC and more,.
• Productization resources
• Turn-key security: Device Guard for IoT, Defender, BitLocker
• App Services

App Servicing for IoT:

• Windows Store
• Install (Windows Store Preinstall Program and MDM)
• Servicing (Windows Store)

We see a video from a service called Xogo: an app that can turn any Windows 10 device into a digital sign: www.xogo.io

Connect

Two kinds of connections: connect to the cloud and connecting to the legacy devices that you already have. Windows 10 IoT has all the APIs for connecting to the cloud built in. Every IoT device connects to the same URL in Azure. You have to configure which IoT Hub you need to connect to. Device is manufactured with an ID from the Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service. The device is shipped to the customer and connects to the UIiT Hub Device Provisioning Service. That knows which Azure IoT hub to register the device to. Assymetric keys are sent to the device, which then uses that information to connect directly to the IoT Hub.

Intelligence at the edge:

• Modern, familiar UI development
• Natural user interface and world sensing support
• Edge compute: not just a sensor but the ability to do some tasks

Vision, speech, and sensor perception open up powerful industry scenarios using:

• Windows sensor & perception APIs
• Microsoft Cognitive Services
• Computer Vision – OpenCV
• Speech recognition and synthesis APIs
• Bing Cloud Speech
• Cortana and natural language understanding

Scale

You need cloud to scale to more than just a few devices. App servicing and telemetry via the Windows Store.

Building a trusted device/solution starts with the device:

• TPM
• Windows Device Attested Health – Device Health Attestation for IoT Core (public preview) – device uses TPM to measure configuration – reposts to MS device halth attestation service, and then you use the report in MDM
• Secure Boot
• BitLocker

Threat resistance:

• Windows as a Service
• Device Guard
• Windows Firewall
• Windows Defender

Data protection in-motion:

• X.509/TLS-based handshake and encryption

Cloud Security

• Encryption at rest
• AAD
• Key Vault
• Policy-based access control
• IP-based blocking
• Secure Device Registration (above)
• Standad-base best practices

Response:

• Device management
• Device recovery
• Device-specific repudiation: device wipe or block the device.

Operate

This is all about managing the device. Enterprise scale is 100,000 devices apparently – typical MDM might be fine. When you go into millions of devices, you need to use the Azure IoT management solution: IoT Hub.

Why Microsoft IoT?

You can easily:

• Build devices with Windows IoT Enterprise (smarter devices) and Windows IoT Core (basic devices)
• Connect to Azure IoT with lots of ready services

You can build all the security, management, AI, etc yourself on another platform, but Windows 10 IoT and Azure have all that ready to use.

Example Customers

FarmBeats is a MS Research project to reduce the cost of farming and to make it smarter. Uses sensors, helium balloons with vision sensors, and drones. Comms based on the unused TV spectrum. They use a heatmap of the farm to plan crop management, using Azure Machine Learning.

Why Should Enterprise Care?

Opportunities to build smarts into all kinds of systems are possible. Businesses can consume and use data with AI-based intelligence, or can optimise existing dumb systems to improve production, reduce times, decrease waste, optimize human effort, etc.