Crosser and Cysec unite to deliver trusted and secure Stream Analytics for IIoT

Stockholm / Lausanne, April 5, 2023 - Crosser, creator of a market leading low-code platform for stream analytics for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and Cysec software maker of a container specific hardened operating system Arca Trusted OS, have announced their collaboration to deliver a secured NIST 800-190 based recommendations and Zero Trust approach IIoT data analytics edge platform.

With the rise of advanced technology such as the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies, manufacturing companies can easily optimize production, performance, profitability and reduce waste. From a highly accurate and standardized stream of data, extracting insights for shop floor equipment, workforce, inventory, supply chain and product quality leads to right decisions.

Meanwhile the promise is huge, manufacturers are facing relevant challenges to deploy such advanced solutions. Due to a huge labor gap in the market, manufacturers face the rut of aging manual workforce and operating on a limited budget. Their production floor environment is based on a patchwork of technologies that were not designed to talk to each other and within common security standards. This results in an unorganized data storage and data policy management. Without straightforward data collection and monitoring solutions, manufacturers have no visibility or control over machine downtime, maintenance schedules, scrap, and performance to production tracking. 

In an even more interconnected world, the manufacturing industry has no choice but to utilize internet connectivity in a variety of ways from which part of their legacy technologies were unprepared to handle the security challenges that come with having so many vulnerable endpoints. Also, the idea that the manufacturing industry didn’t have much to offer threat actors is not true. In fact, companies within the industry have a vast amount of information that attackers are just waiting to use as extortion.

Indeed, according to IBM Security X-Force 2022 report, manufacturing replaced financial services as the top attacked industry in 2021, representing 23.2% of the attacks X-Force remediated last year. Ransomware was the top attack type, accounting for 23% of attacks on manufacturing companies. Supply chain attack, Intellectual Properties theft or commercial information held to ransom are some of the few cyberthreat targets manufacturers are facing.

Crosser and Cysec have come together to facilitate the collection of sensor & machine data from all assets and their analysis leveraging a simple straightforward secured platform. By combining Crosser streaming analytics platform with Cysec Arca Trusted OS container specific hardened operating system, both companies aim to deliver a secured NIST 800-190 based recommendations and Zero Trust approach IIoT data analytics edge platform (see figure below).

Example of distributed assets. Risk for theft, breach and environmental issues at the edge.

Use Case Example - Remote Mining Facility Monitoring

Within the mining industry, the sites are often remote and without stable internet connectivity. Mining regulations state that the mining company needs to monitor various conditions in the mining facility, such as solid conditions, pollution, earth movements etc.

To enable secure and reliable conditions for the facility monitoring, mining companies install cabinets with sensitive equipment for satellite connectivity, data reduction and data analytics. These cabinets are exposed to theft, sabotage and of course harsh weather conditions.

The combined solution of Crosser, Cysec and the designated hardware provider (cabinet), enables real-time streaming data analytics, with triggers and alerts for any scenario in the facility and reliable satellite connectivity. And at the same time, it provides enhanced security for theft and sabotage and other types of digital intrusion targeting the mining company.

The hyper-automated enterprises of tomorrow will integrate all their data in real-time from Cloud Providers, SaaS applications, Enterprise systems and IoT data from machines & assets, and People. 

Our technology enables event driven and real-time Stream Analytics and Intelligent Pipelines & Automations in the crossroad of all these data types, deployable anywhere.

Crosser offers a platform where ease-of-use and agility has been put in the center without limiting the ability for custom innovation, which we call Low-Effort.

With Crosser, building intelligent any-to-any data integration pipelines in a true hybrid manner is straightforward and effortless, allowing for pipelines to run as easily in the edge as they do in the cloud thanks to the Crosser Control Center.

By using a library of building blocks called Modules and a graphical drag-and-drop user interface called Flow Studio, users can create stream analytics and data integration pipelines with fixed rules, custom algorithms, or ML/AI models. These pipelines can be applied to streaming data to identify anomalies on IoT data, video/audio, user behavior, or transactions.

Crosser is a modern real-time integration platform that allows users to build and deploy new data pipelines in minutes with minimum effort.

“Collaborating with Cysec, Crosser can provide a secure execution environment for integration and analytics of any streaming data with unrivaled low effort and low TCO. The combination of Cysec and Crosser secures the delivery of customer value out of their asset data.” says Mikael Samuelsson, Director of Strategic Alliances & Partnerships.

With its container specific hardened operating system Arca Trusted OS, Cysec intends to provide protection of container distributed architecture in the cloud, on premise servers (x86) or at the edge on an ARM based environment following the NIST 800-190 recommendations.

CYSEC ARCA Trusted OS is a trusted execution environment (TEE) for sensitive Kubernetes containers and workloads, with a hardware root of trust, that provides a higher level of data security while ensuring that key management is pain-free and performance is not compromised. CYSEC ARCA protects the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive data while it’s being processed. It enhances data security by generating hardware-based, unexportable encryption keys. CYSEC ARCA protects the full stack, from hardware, to kernel, to application. It is highly available, redundant, scalable, cost effective and DevOps friendly. Today ARCA Trusted OS fully operates on prem, in public cloud (Google, Azure) and at the edge, and will continue to expand its footprint to fully support companies hybrid strategies.

“Crosser and CYSEC joint propositions unlock two critical obstacles at the edge, that is to get the most from the data generated in the field without putting at cyber risk the business. It gives Industrials limitless solutions to expand their businesses at the edge.” says Luca Gabella, VP Sales Edge Computing.  

The Crosser and Cysec joint solution is helping asset rich industries to accelerate innovation when digitizing sensitive assets for example Space, Military, Pharma, Manufacturing and Utility Industries. Enabling a radically simple, flexible and secure solution for edge processing of streaming data.

Trusted and secure stream analytics for Industrial IoT

The Crosser and CYSEC collaboration aims to combine a trusted operating system and a data stream analytics platform in order to deliver an easy secure environment to handle and analyze data as close as possible to where it's generated on infrastructure Industrials do not fully own or control. 

The overall solution provides Operations with an ease-of-use and agile solution that effortlessly takes advantage of a secure infrastructure to protect its daily activities. 

About CYSEC

CYSEC is a European data security company, based in Lausanne and Paris, providing a software solution in Confidential Computing, which enables companies to secure workloads on distributed infrastructures. The company provides a Trusted Execution Environment for containers and helps them to secure and deploy sensitive data on distributed architecture from Data center to the Cloud to the Edge.

CYSEC’s flagship solution, called «ARCA Trusted OS» is a hardened Linux-based operating system combined with a secure Kubernetes orchestrator providing a trusted runtime platform for containers. ARCA provides cryptographic functions, in order to protect keys, code and data, be it at rest, in transit and in use.

Learn more about CYSEC at www.cysec.com. 

About Crosser

Crosser designs and develops Streaming Analytics, Automation and Integration software for any Edge, On-premise or Cloud. The Crosser Platform enables real-time processing of streaming, event-driven or batch data for Industrial IoT and Intelligent Workflows. It is the only platform of its kind that is purpose-built for Industrial and Asset Rich organizations. 

The solution is built to fight complexity with simplicity through the Crosser Flow Studio, the visual design tool that enables teams to innovate faster than ever without developers. The software is ideally suited for Enterprise customers of various industries and applications, including Edge Analytics, Industrial Connectivity,  Industry 4.0, Streaming Analytics, Hybrid Integration and Intelligent Workflows.

Learn more about Crosser at www.crosser.io.