Takeaways from SKO 2023

As part of the Star Lab sales team, I attended the Wind River Annual Kick Off in early February.  As a “newbie” to the Star Lab team with only 4 months under my belt, I was attending with a high degree of curiosity about where our security solutions fit into the larger story of a company that has created embedded development tools for decades.  

From left to right: Jonathan Kline (CTO), Gabriel Quiroz (GM), Claude Chalouhi (Head of Sales), Dan Megan (Sales), and Adam Fraser (COO)

Coincidentally, Wind River is now embarking on a transformational journey of bringing WR Studio to market, a cloud native platform for the development and operation of the intelligent edge.

I have plenty of scars from mergers and acquisitions throughout my career in technology, much of it in security. I’ve seen the results of poor execution, misalignment of goals, and customers alienated by revisions to roadmaps already offered. But I’ve also seen great things happen such as the combination of synergistic technologies creating new solutions, customer-centric focus on solving larger problems and the collaboration of truly brilliant people. So, like I said, I was curious…  

What I found was inspiring. There is a clear understanding that as our world and devices become more connected and more autonomous, security is paramount to the delivery of the intelligent edge. There is a real excitement of so many possibilities to improve lives, drive business value, increase safety, defend nations and launch truly innovative solutions; but paramount to this vision is the trust and confidence that security can be delivered in ways  that minimize risk and protect our citizens.   

We spoke about Star Lab’s unique offerings which drive not just the security of a device but the resiliency of that device as well. When intelligent devices are altered or go offline, bad things can happen, from lost revenues in manufacturing to safety concerns in automobiles and the wellness of patients using medical devices as a few examples. In the case of Ransomware, this blog entry from IOT Security Foundation does an excellent job at explaining why such attacks on IOT devices should not be ignored.

Today’s IOT security landscape needs to mature. There remains a focus on the network, addressing CVEs, and tools to analyze events. All of these strategies are indeed important, but still reactionary in nature. With the combination of Star Lab and Wind River, we are delivering a security ecosystem: one that starts at development, integrating into your CI pipeline to reduce costs and improve security posture. Our solutions embody the “Security by Design” methodology that assumes breaches will happen and allow your system to maintain operation - even while under attack! Finally, our solutions provide analytics to security teams,facilitating that critical feedback loop.   

To learn more about Star Lab solutions, check out one of our whitepapers below.