By Cassandra Balentine
With continued adoption of smart devices, the security of the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes more important. Boston, MA-based LogMeIn recently introduced an IoT-specific identity solution to aid in the creation, management, and authentication of connected individuals.
The company made the 2015 Software 500 list at number 218 with a total revenue of $221.96 million. A public entity, it was established in 2003 and today employs a staff of about 1,000.
LogMeIn is dedicated to simplifying how people connect to each other and their surroundings. Boasting millions of users worldwide, the company’s cloud-based solutions make it possible for people and companies to connect and engage with their workplace, colleagues, customers, and products anywhere at anytime. In addition to its Boston location, the company operates offices in San Francisco, CA as well as Bangalore, Budapest, Dublin, London, and Sydney.
To extend its capabilities further into the IoT, the company unveiled its Xively Identity Manager, which is a new approach to tackling the complex challenges of identity access management (IAM) of IoT users and products.
Xively Identity Manager
The Xively Identity Manager is designed to provide a turnkey, white label option for onboarding and managing new end users of IoT devices and can easily be applied to Web and mobile applications.
“The IoT promises to transform product business by giving them unprecedented visibility into how customers use their products,” says Paddy Srinivasan, VP, products, Xively by LogMeIn. “It is estimated that IoT will deliver trillions of dollars into the economy, both through new markets and expansion or cost savings in existing markets. Because of this, every product company is looking to become a connected product business,” he explains.
LogMeIn recognized early on the opportunity IoT offers and the challenges companies face when looking to begin IoT projects. “Our goal with Xively is to provide those companies with a partner and platform they can trust to accelerate their journey,” says Srinivasan.
With more than a decade of experience connecting companies, LogMeIn is uniquely positioned to help pioneer this new market.
The current generation of Xively was created through the company’s core competencies, technology acquisitions, and experiences with customers as it began taking them from disconnected businesses to a connected enterprise.
The cloud-based application platform offers flexibly to adapt the needs of the business and changing requirements of IoT. “That flexibility allows us to provide solutions for customers of any size looking to bring secure, connected products to market,” says Srinivasan.
Xively has already brought to market solutions across verticals including bio tech, smart home, and manufacturing.
IAM Scaling
The IoT continues to evolve, and as enterprise users progressively adopt the technologies, it is important that IAM is scalable to serve the space.
“The IoT will bring about a variety of new types of users and challenges associated with identity and access management,” predicts Srinivasan. He also warns that most product companies today do not know the end users that interact with their products, which means they are not properly servicing or supporting these users. “An IoT connected business will allow companies to directly engage with end users, bringing a great opportunity and certainty challenges. Connected businesses must be able to identify, categorize, and organize these new users to give them appropriate access and authentication. The tools to properly manage these users do not exist in most companies today,” he says.
Xively Identity Manager offers a solution for onboarding and managing new end users of IoT devices that can be easily applied to Web and mobile applications through an API. Part of the Xively IoT platform is its ability to integrate with Xively’s “Blueprint” capability, which provides companies with a seamless way to manage identities and access for employees and their relationships across, between, and with customers, applications, connected products, and connected product data.
Srinivasan says the Xively Identity Manager is designed specifically for IoT use cases, giving its customers a “complete and immediate option for reducing risk, bolstering security, and accelerating time to market.”
By providing businesses with ways to quickly rollout an identity solution to capture information of end users, Xively also allows businesses to map identities to devices for access control, working in tandem with Xively Blueprint on security and authentication. Scalable runtime access ensures secure authentication at sub-second latency and enables management of the full lifecycle of creation, onboarding, and decommissioning for both primary and secondary users.
Preparing for IoT
IoT is a hot topic that continues to gain ground. Srinivasan says that while some IT ecosystem players focus on platforms for IoT connectivity, LogMeIn’s Xively is a comprehensive connected product management (CPM) platform. “A true CPM platform combines a connectivity platform, an IoT Management platform, as well as applications giving companies everything they need to quickly become a connected business,” he offers. SW
