Your IOT Application May Need Fog Computing: Here’s 7 Reasons

In today’s increasingly digital world, cybersecurity is a top concern for businesses, for government entities, and for individuals. And as millions upon millions of devices become connected, hackers find new vulnerabilities to exploit, and increasingly sophisticated attacks make it far more difficult for systems to identify, protect and react to these threats.

However, beyond stealing intelligence or disrupting business activity, hackers now have more entry points that allow them to damage our physical world and pose serious safety risks to utilities, factories, transportation systems, and other critical infrastructures. But now, fog computing[1], an open architecture that is enabling innovation for IoT, 5G, and AI, has emerged as a solution for mitigating such threats.

Let’s look at why you should consider fog computing for your IoT applications:

The Role of Fog in IoT

1. Security

Fog distributed architecture, safeguards connected systems from cloud to device, creating an additional layer of system security in which compute, control, storage, networking, and communications work closer to the services, alongside the data sources they serve and protect. With fog, security resides directly in the local context, and not as a remote function.

Now, taking a closer look, fog nodes protect cloud-based IoT and fog-based services by performing a wide range of security functions on any number of interconnected devices, even the smallest and most resource-constrained. This includes providing a trusted distributed platform and execution environment for applications and services, managing and updating security credentials, malware detection, distributing timely software patches quickly and at scale.

2. Optimizes storage capacity

Fog computing optimizes IoT storage capacity because it helps in channeling selected data to the cloud service for historical purpose and longer-term storage.

3. Total control

Fog computing gives one total control on how they want to store their data, and when. Put differently, it doesn’t automatically back up your files except you choose to do so. Plus, it uses less bandwidth which is a big advantage to those that have limited bandwidths to spare.

4. Operate reliably with quick decisions

Fog computing often enhances a quick processing speed, be it during storage, synchronization and so on. Plus, it is very reliable, as a result of its security level as discussed earlier.

5. Collect and secure a wide range of data

The best part about fog computing is that it is capable of storing and securing data of any size and type, provided you have the internet services needed to carry out such uploading.

6. Communication and Monitoring

Fog ensures trustworthy communication by detecting, validating and reporting attacks.  It can monitor the security status of nearby devices to quickly detect isolated threats. If a security breach is detected, fog provides trusted foundations that enable a real-time incident response, directly, and within the local context, thus minimizing disruption of services and through its scalability modularity, capacity, and resource distribution.

7. Low Cost

Fog allows for blockchain deployments to low-cost IoT endpoints. Now, let’s take a look at some examples. So, let’s assume that multiple power generators are infected with malware root of trust capabilities based within, a fog node will allow operations managers to remotely isolate, and shutter the generators that are infected, thus keeping service disruption to a minimum.

So, the destruction of a service attack is launched against a highly connected multi-purpose high-rise. The building’s fog architecture will also ensure that the fog cloud computing[2], is the single point of reference outside the building, greatly diminishing the attack surface.

During the attack, fog nodes continue to operate autonomously using only their local intelligence and locally stored data to manage permissions and data accessibility for building services, which will ensure that things like elevators security systems, fire alarms, garage doors, and other critical services remain active. Hackers often seek to take over a smart factory by targeting a vulnerability in the assembly line equipment.

However, fog nodes protect IoT domains by monitoring traffic from the internet into the distributed fog network and leveraging machine learning in the local context to detect a probable attack once detected.

In a nutshell, fog nodes act as gateways blocking traffic from the attackers and protecting the factory. Prominent Network European cities such as Luxembourg and Lisbon among others utilize a network of security cameras to comply with general data protection regulation standards. Now, such network cities can anonymize video data via a local fog node. If an incident does occur, public and safety officials can disable this functionality for real-time identification purposes.