From Risk to Resilience: Secure Azure IoT for Manufacturing

CASE STUDY

Business Overview

A leading manufacturing company developed a feature-rich Azure IoT application to enable secure remote monitoring of their operations. The solution was designed to support large-scale deployment and compliance with industry standards.

Challenge

During a vulnerability assessment, the application was found to have 27 critical security issues. These gaps needed to be remediated in order to:

Obtain NIST 800 certification for production release.
Ensure a secure and compliant transition into post-production operational support.

Solution

NeST Digital implemented a structured security remediation and compliance framework:

- Conducted a gap analysis against NIST 800 standards.
- Remediated all identified vulnerabilities through secure coding, configuration hardening, and architectural improvements.
Prioritized implementation of key security controls, including:

- Secure firmware management
- Over-the-air (OTA) updates
- Trusted Platform Module (TPM) attestation
- Operating system (OS) hardening
- Encryption of data in transit and at rest
Incorporated these controls as backlog features in the product roadmap.
Adopted Azure Sentinel as the SIEM tool to provide centralized monitoring, analytics, and incident detection.
Established a post-production support model with continuous monitoring, vulnerability scanning, and incident management.

Business Impact

- 100% closure of all 27 vulnerabilities.
- Achieved NIST 800 certification, enabling production release.
- Delivered robust compliance assurance and improved operational security.

Outcomes achieved: