Guest Post By Chris Swan

Dispersive announced last week it has developed a combined offering with ClearBlade, a pioneer and fast-growing Industrial IoT software and platform company delivering sophisticated connected systems for large enterprises. We’ve been working together in our labs and behind the scenes to bundle ClearBlade’s award-winning and widely deployed IIoT solutions (which support edge, cloud and enterprise systems, big data collection, analytics and real time control systems), to make it easier for customers to benefit from zero-touch commissioning, management, and zero-trust networking.

Why did we invest in this collective offering? The market demands it, as cybersecurity threats extend to the device and push deeper into the vulnerabilities of unprotected and distributed networks. Security must be embedded in every element of mission critical IIoT systems: from the edge device to the gateway, from the edge mesh network, to a fully private network which enables edge data to be sent to the cloud for cloud computing, analytics, reporting, remote monitoring and management, connected field service and more.

Dispersive’s DVN plays an important role in ensuring traffic flows securely, reliably and instantaneously from the edge to the cloud, and our architecture and networking technology (which has been awarded over 30 US patents) gives ClearBlade an advantage as it complements their existing IIoT security layers and ensures data at rest and in motion are nearly impossible to breach.

Our commitment to the SASE framework, introduced by Gartner in 2019, is a distinct differentiator in the market, especially as we apply these capabilities to the IoT world including the cloud, devices and people that depend on our secure networking capabilities.

A SASE platform delivered over a distributed cloud framework provides security features for all endpoints, users, and edges. Dispersive’s SASE solution enables enterprises to manage network and security policies through a single console, making it easier and more efficient for IT teams and managed service providers to orchestrate, manage, and troubleshoot.

Our SASE solution, which works hand-in-glove with ClearBlade’s IIoT offerings, improves security and performance while lowering total cost of ownership.

• Built-in performance acceleration
• Self-healing under attack or QoS issue
• Zero-trust network access
• Mobile, IoT and branch edge enabled
• End-point and control plane obfuscation
• Multiple encrypted paths and segments
• Underlay network agnostic & multi-cloud capable

Our virtualized overlay network has been “Red Team” tested by the most demanding organizations in the world and is resistant to DoS, DDoS and Man in the Middle Attacks with up to 10x performance improvement over SD-WAN/VPN based solutions.

Here’s how we do it with our patented programmable networking software:

• Data streams are split at the source and sent via multiple encrypted paths to Deflects using existing IP networks.
• New paths are established real-time for quality of service and security.
• Data deflects forward packets to the final destination.
• The authenticated destination reassembles the split packet.
• Missing packets are re-requested for guaranteed packet delivery.

Building communications drivers and other connectivity components for industrial systems is challenging and increasingly important. The industrial control and automation industry started decades ago with proprietary control systems running on central computers that were hardwired to field devices. This rapidly evolved to distributed controllers connected over proprietary private networks. Over time, smaller computers and PCs distributed functions over networks, and distributed computing has become the norm, but not without disasters along the way.

Given the challenges of physical connectivity and data integration, new risks emerge and put pressure on the connectivity part of the equation. Building private networks from scratch has taken enterprises years, has been costly and far more difficult to maintain than some originally hoped.

IIoT implementations have grown bigger, more distributed, and operators of those systems have learned that the more sensors, assets, equipment and software applications are added, the harder it is to secure a network to scale.

Together with ClearBlade we can offer networking within a full solution, which will be key for the massive growth predicted for the use of Artificial Intelligence and fully autonomous systems.

Our partnership with ClearBlade will make this simpler, more predictable, less risky with better scale by ensuring the connectivity required to connect edge and cloud is as programmable as the platform and solutions ClearBlade has been implementing for years.

Please see our solution brief here or contact us to learn more.