Cisco Jasper sees three primary challenges for IoT testing
Cisco acquired Jasper Technologies, the platform behind AT&T Drive and other carrier “internet of things” offerings, earlier this year for $1.4 billion. Theresa Bui Revon, head of enterprise product marketing for IoT cloud at Cisco Jasper, said the company has 5,000 enterprise customers, supports 34 million devices under management on its platform and is adding more than 1.5 million devices per month.
“Some people talk about IoT hype; we talk about IoT reality,” Revon said.
Cisco Jasper primarily manages cellular connectivity for devices with SIM cards, but plans to expand its support for Wi-Fi as well as low-power, wide-area networks. Within that context, Revon laid out a number of challenges for IoT testing beyond the essentials of radio frequency functionality.
Ensuring connected functionality within the supply chain
The first challenge is supporting the need for various levels of functionality at different points in the IoT supply chain, Revon said, giving an example of a complex international supply chain.
“One of the challenges for companies who are delivering devices at scale is that they are manufacturing that device somewhere in Asia, then assembling it in Latin America. Then it gets sent to distributors in multiple global markets, and that device ends up in a consumer’s home or car or at a commercial building,” Revon said. “It’s crossed three to four different geographic markets and it can literally be, from factory shipment to live-and-up-and-running in a consumer’s home, anywhere from one month to six to eight months. One of the first challenges is just ensuring that connectivity is happening where it needs to happen.”
For example, Revon noted a device needs to be able to attach to a mobile network during manufacturing testing; then have no connectivity during overseas shipping. In the case of a connected car, some connectivity needs to be enabled while it is on a dealer’s lot so that potential buyers can see the features at work – but probably not a fully-enabled package, since the car has not yet been purchased.
Ensuring secure network permissions
The second challenge in terms of testing around network connectivity is making sure the device is set up with the right network security permissions, Revon said, who cited the example of a connected vending machine operator with tens of thousands of machines whose communications should be limited in order to be secure.
“I should be able to talk to those vending machines … but no other devices should be accessing those vending machines,” Revon explained. “So the second challenge is testing for the security, that the right security permissions are in place around the connectivity, on the device and system, so that no one who shouldn’t be talking to those devices are talking to those devices.”
Understanding normal connectivity behavior for an IoT device
Revon sees the third challenge for connectivity testing for IoT devices as understanding what the normal behavior for such a device is, which is going to vary substantially between devices. For a water meter, she said, normal behavior might be to turn on once per day and pass between two and 10 kilobytes of data to the network. A connected gasoline pump would likely be on 24 hours per day, seven days per week; and devices that support mobile payments are more likely to send data on the order of five to eight megabytes per month. Having a good handle on the expectations for device behavior ensures a company can test to support that type of usage and can also monitor for normal behavior after the device has been deployed.
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