Mender blog

With the proliferation of embedded devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) across a variety of industry verticals, a host of assets are scattered globally across terrain, geography, or customer locations. Support for remote software updates is inevitable for effective operations. Industry verticals such as transportation, energy, consumer, smart building and manufacturing rely heavily on a potent...

It is safe to say that the connected industry will not self-regulate and take the necessary security measures when developing new IoT products. As more of our lives come under the control of machines, the negative impact of security flaws increases. Small steps to regulate the IoT industry have been taken on most continents, but without any meaningful impact on the industry. All new regulations ha...

The boards with binary distros are very popular in the development of IoT projects, such as Raspberry Pi. Depending on product goals, a large share of devices in early phases of product planning and prototyping could be based on Linux of one form or another due to their prevalence of low-cost with ready-made Linux distributions and their relatively quick access and setup. However, when it comes...

The term over-the-air (OTA) updates is today often used interchangeably with “software updates” in the context of connected devices and IoT.

However, the term originates from the telecom industry, where it has been used for a much wider scope than just software. For example, a special type of SMS message from the cellular provider to all phone subscribers can change the way phones are configure...

During 2015 we spent a lot of time talking to users and companies in the embedded space. Our early findings which continued to be confirmed during the market research showed that 50% of all connected devices had no way to be remotely updated. Besides some outliers, the other 50% had homegrown solutions to do over-the-air updates (OTA). Common for almost all homegrown solutions were their fragili...