The State of Zero Touch in Industrial IoT

With the ongoing growth of automated systems and the Industrial IoT, and with an increasing number of physically distributed systems in the transportation, agriculture, and other markets, the value of Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) and management is expanding. Networking has become more complex, and at the same time more agile with increasing virtualization of network functions, which makes it more possible to create and roll out “programmable” IoT solutions with more control and security necessary as cyber threats also grow.Integrating and configuring IoT devices takes significant time when provisioning is manual, and this extends into the management of these devices, including implementing updates and patches. Given the popularity and success of early IoT and Industrial IoT solutions, we are seeing an endless supply of new network devices to connect, across multiple protocols, using sensors of all kinds, which makes the process of provisioning and management even more difficult, unless this is done using IoT platforms with automation built in.