PrismTech's Vortex Secures Connections Between Endpoints, Cloud Apps

PrismTech has updated its Vortex data-sharing solution with security to better protect connections between endpoints and cloud applications, allowing for distributed Internet of Things (IoT) computing between devices, the edge and the cloud, the company said.

Vortex is a standards-based data-sharing platform for the IoT that combines deterministic data delivery and system-wide data sharing and support for data analytics. The platform is built on the Object Management Group’s (OMG) Data Distribution Service (DDS) for Real-time Systems open standard and other widely used technologies to provide Internet scale, real-time data sharing.

PrismTech has made a number of improvements in the platform’s 2.0 release to provide ubiquitous data sharing across device, fog computing and cloud-computing environments and provide more ease of use, the company said. It also has expanded platform support as well as added general robustness and secure connectivity to the release.

“We believe that Vortex 2.0 addresses the real-time data sharing requirements of IoT systems better than any other platform available,” said Dr. Angelo Corsaro, PrismTech’s chief technology officer, in a press release.

New features in the release include better secure interest-based routing of real-time information between the multicast-enabled edge networks and unicast networks and endpoints in Vortex Fog, a new feature that helps address the bandwidth problems of IoT systems by allowing data to be processed closer to the network edge when it makes sense to do so instead of sending it all the way from the edge to cloud apps, he said.

Vortex Fog and another feature called Vortex Cloud also add capability called Boundary Security, which can be used to enable secure communications at the boundary between subsystems, according to PrismTech. This is a fundamental requirement for helping to secure the IoT, the company said.

Vortex 2.0 also includes support for Google Protocol Buffers, which is a widely adopted, proven technology to provide language and platform-neutral support for evolutionary data-models. The release also includes support for the latest versions of the DDS Data Centric Publish and Subscribe (DCPS) APIs, including Java 5, ISO C++ and C99 APIs.

Other enhancements to the release include support for Windows 10 and Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan as well as the addition of Python scripting to the Vortex OpenSplice Tester tool to enable “black-box” system testing and debugging of DDS-based IoT systems, the company said.