Next-gen IoT solutions are improving individuals’ lives and enterprise operations as we speak; our well-beings and healthcare, improvements to travel, communications, work, home life, industrial supply chains, smart cities, you name it. However, to maintain this IoT movement on local and global scales alike, battles for consumer trust must be won. Providers take part in working to achieve balance, hurdling towards new standards for trusted device protections to help IoT-focused industries build bridges towards a more securely connected 2024 and beyond.
The equation here, so to speak, looks something like this:
Embedded Security + Device Observability = IoT Magic
One provider that is hard at work to solve this equation?
In 2018, Sternum made news with a $2.5 million funding round. A year later, it deployed its deterministic security model – “airtight and future-proofed,” in Sternum’s words – on more than 100,000 IoT devices produced by some of the world’s largest manufacturers. In 2020, another Sternum funding round raised a whopping $6.5 million, led by Square Peg and b2venture (formerly btov Partners). That same year (even while the world was struck by the COVID-19 pandemic), Sternum was granted three security patents and began work to expand its team.
By 2022, Sternum had raised an even larger $27 million in a round led by Spark Capital, and had successfully expanded its team in the U.S. and the EU, adding more experts to its roster.
In present day, Sternum’s full-stack platform saves device manufacturers in three main ways: money, manpower, and time. Specifically, it cuts patching costs (by roughly 40%) to mitigate risks and streamline compliance, uses real-time data to improve workers’ informed decisions, and it boosts time-to-market, performance, quality, and reliability.
Major-leagues IoT defense means IoT magic is, indeed, achievable.
That’s why Sternum was able to hit another goal: Its platform has achieved the widely coveted UL Solutions Diamond Level Qualification. This, as the announcement stated, “serves as a testament to Sternum’s high-level proficiency in cybersecurity protection for IoT products globally.”
For context, UL Solutions’ security rankings are:
Each of these security tiers, respectively, touch on password protections, secure reset capabilities, intuitive access controls, privacy best practices, maintenance protocols, data security (I feel like that one’s obvious), mobile app security, anonymization of user data, illegitimate access attempt protection (in addition to malware protection and malicious software modification detection) and quite a bit more. (That’s the Reader’s Digest for this UL Solutions list, essentially.) These key “Security Capabilities Verified” benchmarks are must-achieves for security-conscious orgs, and Sternum is now on that list.
“Receiving the highest-level IoT Security Rating from UL Solutions is acknowledgment of our mission to prevent all code and memory manipulation attempts to IoT devices,” said Natali Tshuva, Sternum’s CEO. “This will serve clientele streamlined assessment procedures for their offerings and aid in obtaining regulatory consents. We remain devoted to moving IoT security forward and accelerating confidence with secure solutions.”
“We are pleased to be on this journey with Sternum as they strive to bring more secure products and innovations to the market,” said Dean Zwarts, Senior Business Manager of the Identity Management and Security Group at UL Solutions. “We look forward to collaborating with industry leaders like Sternum to help improve IoT software security and advance software supply chain management.”