Security is the top of mind issue at many engineering organizations. Not only are more and more devices becoming connected, but their software functionality represents more value to end users and, in many cases, its compromise or failure can result can significant financial liabilities for OEMs. During this QuickCast, VDC's Chris Rommel focuses on one of the leading trends influencing the embedded market - the growing threat of security breaches.
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Allowing for efficient resource partitioningCreating demand for hosted services and real-time, ubiquitous information accessOur research indicates that over 50% of embedded engineers surveyed expect their projects to require some form of web connectivity within the next two years.It is this growing interconnectivity with other devices and support systems that is now forcing engineers and IT developers to take each other’s system requirements and resources into consideration for their designs.There is a clear move toward interconnectivity within the embedded market, with the percentage of engineers expecting their projects in 2 years to include web components 20% higher than current project values. As a result, more embedded engineers are being forced to consider the requirements of the IT developers who are developing the back-end systems to support the data sharing and real-time analytics empowered by next generation devices and cloud services. Although the trend toward ubiquitous connectivity will certainly continue to impact engineers going forward, the potentially more commercially salient impact of web evolution to SSLM tools vendors may be the broadening of potential adopters of SSLM tools to developers and third party organizations focused on building applications for the cloud.Additionally, we have already seen the cloud begin to impact product delivery models for other lifecycle management solutions – namely Testing-as-a-Service – although the model may prove less viable for certain SSLM solutions that do not typically require the same system resources to be run natively on host development platforms as do some testing tools. Nevertheless, there is a growing expectation within end users for this level of ubiquitous and real-time access
As I mentioned on the previous slide, the engineering community continues to look for new solutions that can offer a means to abstract the complexity brought on by the move to multicore processors. One of the solutions that more engineering organizations are turning to is virtualization, which can allow a target device run multiple OSs over the same piece of silicon – potentially allowing organizations to more easily run existing SW assets over their legacy operating systems.As you can see from these findings from our 2011 Embedded system engineering survey, more and more engineers report that they are using virtualization in their current solution. In fact, as compared to our 2008 results, the current project use rates are up approximately 50%.The potential applications of the technology are not limited to solving multicore-related issues, however. Engineering organizations can look to this technology for a number of reasons including the ability to enhance system security, reduce bill of material costs, or even to allow the creation of multiple “profiles” that can partition enterprise and consumer assets. Whereas adoption of the technology is expected to increase going forward, it is working against a few different factors that are inhibiting its growth, first of which is just the awareness of the technology.Despite the increasingly commonplace utilization of the technology for enterprise server use cases, a majority of embedded engineers remain less than “Extremely familiar with the embedded version of the technology. Additionally, a number of engineers still report concerns about the possible impacts on their project’s complexity, real-time requirements, as well as potentially adding another SW licensing cost.That said, we anticipate that growth in the adoption and potential utility of this technology will continue going forward as more OEMs look to facilitate their transition to new hardware architectures and more device classes gain connectivity requirements that place further strain on current security mitigation strategies
If you have questions about this webcast, our research, or any other topics within the world of embedded software and tools technologies, please do not hesitate to contact us.Thank you for joining us today!