How to Manage IoT Device Configurations at Scale

From security cameras that monitor physical security to sensors that help predict machine maintenance, Internet of Things (IoT) devices are ubiquitous across the enterprise IT and operational technology environment. Internet-connected devices enable everything from video conference calls to machinery floors, yet their value is often diminished by their inherent security issues. 

Unlike traditional workstations or laptops, IoT devices cannot often manage security protections like data-at-rest encryption or installation of anti-malware/anti-virus solutions. To mitigate these risks, many organizations rely on maximizing what security measures they can get out of these devices, implementing secure configurations across their IoT device fleets. Unfortunately, configuring IoT devices is a time-consuming, error-prone manual process that often prevents organizations from scaling their deployments. 

Automating IoT configuration management enables organizations to secure and scale their deployments while maintaining the documentation necessary to achieve compliance objectives. 

Why Is IoT Configuration Management Important?

IoT configuration management enables organizations to improve device operation and connectivity by ensuring that devices stay reliably connected to networks with configurations that mitigate security risks. Some key benefits of IoT configuration management include:

• Enhanced Connectivity: Seamless communication across networks and devices
• Higher Uptime: Fewer security-related reasons for devices to cease functioning
• Cost Efficiency: Reduced need for on-site management
• Security: Real-time updates to mitigate breaches

How Does Manual IoT Device Configuration Management Impact Scalability?

Managing IoT configurations can either support or undermine an organization’s ability to scale its fleet. Effective configuration management ensures devices are in their best state, both for performance and cybersecurity. However, many organizations struggle to have the configurations they want at all times, especially when manual work is needed on each device to set or confirm a configuration.

Manual configuration management processes can prevent organizations from scaling their IoT fleets for various reasons, including:

• Inability to apply updates quickly across all devices
• Inability to maintain consistent configurations across complex, diverse fleets 
• Failure to identify configuration drift arising from daily operations or other updates 
• Requirement to understand vendor and device-specific processes for configuration, which can cost time

What Challenges Do Organizations Face in IoT Configuration Management?

The sheer number of IoT devices and their wide distribution across locations make it difficult for organizations to maintain consistent configurations. As organizations attempt to scale their IoT fleets, they often face the following configuration management challenges. 

Scale and Complexity

As organizations adopt more IoT devices, they struggle to manage the high volumes of diverse devices that have different hardware, firmware, and connectivity requirements. Changing configurations can impact device connectivity, leading to service disruptions. Meanwhile, maintaining consistent configurations becomes overwhelming when IT and security teams need to coordinate configuration changes across hundreds or thousands of devices. 

Communication and Connectivity

Configuring network settings for IoT devices can be challenging, especially if connections are inconsistent. Secure configurations typically limit the number and type of ports that an IoT device uses to communicate with the public internet. Maintaining consistency becomes a challenge. For example, a device may be allowed to communicate through a typically closed port for a specific reason, but manual processes can leave this port open indefinitely or be forgotten about. 

Device Lifecycles

Organizations need to maintain consistent, secure configurations across the device lifecycle, including:

• Deployment: Setting initial configurations that mitigate security risks, like changing default passwords, limiting connectivity, or limiting the services running. 
• Maintenance: Keeping configurations consistent through typical upkeep activities, like firmware updates, or after vulnerabilities are discovered.
• Decommissioning: Returning devices to factory settings by removing all IT and interoperability configurations, like IP addresses or Active Directory accounts.

Configuration Drift

Hardening IoT devices by implementing initial approved, secure configurations is challenging enough. However, configuration drift – when unintended changes impact device settings – complicates IoT device management and security. To manage drift effectively, organizations need a change management process that defines how to request, review, approve, and document any configuration changes. Accidental changes violate these internal controls, which impact IoT security and the organization’s compliance posture.

How Does Automation Help Overcome These IoT Device Configuration Management Challenges?

Automating configuration management processes enables organizations to manage IoT device configurations at scale. Automated systems enable organizations to identify configuration drift and maintain secure configurations, even when activities like firmware updates can lead to accidental changes. 

Streamlining Operations and Reducing Costs

Centralized IoT configuration management platforms reduce complexity by organizing IoT devices so organizations can efficiently control them. With a cloud-based IoT management solution, companies can remotely monitor, control, and update large device fleets while maintaining reliable operations. By quickly addressing performance issues, handling firmware updates, and reducing the time spent troubleshooting, these platforms support scalability and cost reduction. 

Protecting the IoT Ecosystem from Threats

IoT ecosystems are vulnerable to unauthorized access and cyber threats. To mitigate the devices’ inherent security risks, maintaining secure configurations is a critical security and compliance initiative. Limiting device connectivity and services enables organizations to comply with data protection regulations, mitigate security risks, and maintain data integrity. An automated IoT configuration management platform can continuously monitor and identify potential security issues so organizations can mitigate risk. 

Scale with the IoT Deployment

As IoT deployments grow, the number of connected devices increases. Successful growth relies on easy and efficient deployment and configurations. An IoT management platform can handle the complexity of these growing fleets and help ensure security for large-scale IoT ecosystems. By using a centralized configuration management system, organizations gain consistent oversight of and documentation for their device management, even across different physical locations. 

What To Look For in an Automated IoT Device Configuration Solution?

When choosing an IoT device configuration solution, organizations should consider various capabilities, including its ability to efficiently manage large-scale deployments, maintain performance, and support a wide variety of device types. As organizations evaluate solutions, they may want to look for the following capabilities. 

Centralized Configuration Management for Improved Visibility

As the organization scales its IoT fleet, it needs to establish a centralized location for hardening devices and monitoring for configuration drift. The platform should provide visibility into device settings groups by different areas and provide information gathered from the network to identify the most important aspects of a device. 

Identify Known Good Configurations

Hardening IoT devices means identifying and storing known good configurations for each device. When evaluating an IoT configuration management automation solution, organizations should consider that the platform provides recommendations for configuring the device models connecting to networks. Some considerations for implementing these controls should include:

• Implementing robust authentication, like changing default credentials or allowing for multi-factor authentication (MFA). 
• Configuring a secure boot function.
• Pushing out over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates. 
• Recommending device service and network connectivity settings to limit communications. 

A well-planned configuration strategy enables an organization to reduce manual tasks and operational costs. 

Create a Snapshot to Document Approved Secure Configurations

A snapshot documents the initial secure configurations, providing the state of a device and recording when the review occurred. Changes between snapshots can even be the basis for understanding why changes happened or for constructing a device configuration timeline. Organizations can supply this documentation to their auditors to prove that they hardened their IoT devices and maintained them as required by their internal change management controls. 

Organizations should implement risk-based rules for how often the platform takes snapshots, with high-risk devices reviewed more often. Additionally, these snapshots can preserve an approved good configuration so that the organization can recover from a security incident or other service disruption faster. 

Provide Alerts for Detecting Configuration Drift

The organization’s change management controls set the processes for updating devices, like installing security patches or a new firmware version. To maintain compliance with internal controls, organizations need to prevent configuration drift or have a way to remediate issues as quickly as possible. 

An IoT configuration management automation solution should allow the organization to:

• Set configuration variances that trigger alerts.
• Document when and how a configuration changed. 
• Classify configurations into risk-based categories that reduce alert fatigue. 

Compare Snapshot Against Current State

Comparing a snapshot against the device’s current state evaluates whether the recorded approved configurations match the live configurations, helping to identify drift. An IoT configuration management solution should allow the organization to compare the current state with approved configurations and highlight any changes. Further, it should provide the information detailing when the changes occurred while allowing the organization to roll back to the approved configurations easily. 

Asimily Configuration Control: Automating IoT Device Configuration Management at Scale

Asimily’s Configuration Drift module, part of the Asimily platform, stores a snapshot of each IoT device connected to your network so that you can document the known good state for them. The information includes complete details about the device and its connectivity, including:

• Ports
• Services
• External IP
• Topology

By storing this information, you have the most complete known good state snapshot so you can implement, monitor, and maintain secure configurations. Further, this documentation makes it easier to roll back any devices that deviate from the approved secure baselines, whether caused by normal maintenance or a cyber attack, to their secure state. 

Asimily’s Configuration Control module allows you to classify configurations based on risk categories to reduce alert fatigue. Additionally, you can create alert triggers around various parameters to focus on the configuration changes that matter most. 

Contact us today to learn more about Asimily Configuration Control.