Across the embedded and IoT industries, OEMs face mounting pressure to implement robust security measures ‐ yet building a hardened infrastructure in-house demands deep expertise and high costs.
Without reliable remote management, companies are forced into inefficient, manual interventions like field servicing or product recalls. As devices proliferate, the stakes rise: an unmanaged fleet represents not only operational complexity but also serious security and business continuity risks.
These realities create a difficult landscape where maintaining control, minimizing cost, and reducing exposure are essential for long-term success.
Challenges
Active-Edge Solutions Limited is helping embedded developers and device manufacturers to navigate the challenges in managing and updating globally deployed edge devices over their lifecycle
- Rapid hardware prototyping: Clients need immediate boot-up and integration capabilities with minimal friction
- Mass global deployment: Tens of thousands of deployed units across diverse environments
- Maintaining uptime: Devices cannot be easily power-cycled for standard updates
- Tightening security standards: Emerging regulations demand end-to-end trust and security-focused updates in-field
Solution
Active-ESL chose Foundries.io to embed a rigorous, security-focused Linux® foundation into their edge AI, EV, and gateway devices, benefitting in particular from key functionality:
- Secure Boot Chain: Implements chain of trust from power-on: signed bootloader → signed kernel → signed OS → signed drivers
- Remote Update Management: Superior firmware and patch delivery to in-field devices—no need to power-cycle
- End-of-Life Security Maintenance: Continuous remote support/enforcement enhance device protections throughout their operational lifetime
Outcomes & ROI
By integrating the FoundriesFactory™ platform, Active-ESL is able to optimize edge devices, making them more resilient, secure-focused and ready. Their ease of use, combined with enterprise- grade security and remote update capabilities, empowers customers while helping to meet modern security demands.Highlights are:
- Reduced time-to-deploy hardware: Ready to use boards boot and connect to the FoundriesFactory platform instantly
- Operational reliability at scale: Superior remote updates keep tens of thousands of devices online
- Superior security features: Helping OEMs to meet requirements with signed boot and updates
- Improved customer confidence & trust
Remote App Management with Linux and Modular Design
Active-ESL is producing a standard range of platforms that cover a broad range of applications, whether that is a high-performance communications gateway, a simple IOT device or a battery powered handheld unit. With these platforms, Active-ESL customers will no longer need to be experts in hardware design, embedded Linux development, code deployment and updating, or device security.
They can focus on what makes their product unique. The platform they use for development can be taken into mass production. If some custom engineering is required, then Active-ESL can handle that as a background task, allowing the customer to continue developing on the standard platform. The good news: any software developed on the standard platform will run, with very few changes, on the custom platform.
Why FoundriesFactory product and Linux microPlatform
Built on Foundries.io’s Linux infrastructure, the combination of the FoundriesFactory software as a service product and the Linux microPlatform, Active-ESL’s AI Edge Gateway is based on their chosen hardware ‐ the NXP i.MX 8M Mini applications processor ‐ to deliver a production-ready embedded platform. With flexible M.2 and mini PCIe support, the Active-ESL AI Edge Gateway accommodates a wide variety of communications modules. Applications can be developed and managed remotely, and for bespoke needs, full design support is readily available.
Customer Feedback
“We want you to be able to take one of our boards, power it on and start using it … remotely manage that device, and then you can start developing your application and your value", Alex Lennon, Director, Active Edge Solutions Limited.