David Bowden is a Principal Research Scientist with Dell EMC Research Europe, based in Cork, Ireland, and started working on SCADA systems 40 years ago for Wessex Water Authority. Since then he has worked in a broad range of industries from Airlines to Banking, Public Utilities to Broadcasting, and has developed solutions for many types of platforms from micros to mainframes, primarily in the area of software architecture and development, but also in systems integration, infrastructure, communications, project management and UI design. David has a M.Sc. in Cloud Computing from CIT. He has worked for Dell EMC for 10 years, and has held positions as a Consultant Software Engineer in VMAX Engineering and Advisory Solutions Architect in Global Services. He joined the research team several years ago, focusing on semantic modelling, real-time analytics and cyber security, and has implemented numerous IoT proof of concepts. 

The current trend in IoT is to push ever more processing to the Edge of the Cloud, which could yield many advantages, but brings a new set of security challenges. It’s difficult enough to harden conventional Cloud systems, by building more robust walls and virtual boundaries – but at the Edge, IoT devices are isolated and vulnerable; they need a new set of security tools and techniques to defend themselves, and know who to trust. Like other IoT vendors, Dell is seeking to identify the new vulnerabilities of dynamic Edge systems that are constantly changing, and how we can apply security techniques from other disciplines, such as machine learning, to proactively identify threats and build trust relationships, at the Edge of the IoT Cloud. This talk will consider the lessons learned by our initial Edge implementations, and some of the security solutions we, and our partners, are developing to address these challenges.