For enterprises that rely on connected devices such as industrial sensors in their operations, making sure the hardware can be properly maintained is a major priority. It’s a need that Microsoft Corp. is looking to address with a new “internet of things” service called IoT Hub Device Streams.

Launched today, the offering builds on the IoT Hub device management platform in Azure. It lets administrators log into a connected device that needs maintenance without requiring their company to relax its firewall policies.

Typically, organizations block most forms of remote access to their systems to avoid opening the door to hackers. IoT Hub Device Streams facilitates secure access by routing traffic through the existing network link that a device managed via IoT Hub uses to connect to Azure.

“IoT devices can be reached from service endpoints without [the] opening of inbound firewall ports at the device or network perimeters,” explained Reza Sherafat, Microsoft’s senior program manager for Azure IoT. “All that is needed is the ability to create outbound connections to IoT Hub cloud endpoints over port 443 (devices that use IoT Hub SDK already maintain such a connection).”

Routing requests through IoT Hub instead of using a direct connection has other advantages as well. The service encrypts all traffic by default and requires that the systems on both ends of a connection authenticate themselves, which creates an added layer of security.

Yet more insulation is provided by the fact that IoT Hub Device Streams establishes connections on a “point-to-point” basis. In other words, an administrator can only access the device they’ve logged into. The device, in turn, is limited to interacting with only a small portion of the back-end cloud infrastructure. The result is a reduced attack surface for hackers to target.

Microsoft sees IoT Hub Device Streams coming in handy for a variety of situations. Administrators can use it to pull up a device’s diagnostics dashboard when something goes wrong, while developers may retrieve data and logs needed for their software projects. The service also promises to ease the task of providing access to third parties such as a company’s corporate partners.

Photo: Unsplash