Red Hat is teaming up with Italy’s Eurotech in a bid to help Internet of Things projects get bigger and more flexible without sacrificing their security.

The companies have pooled their technical powers to combat the scale, latency, reliability and security weaknesses within complex Internets of Things. Their joint ambition is to obviate the need for the mass consignment of data to the cloud for real-time processing. Instead, they want to set up a more robust alternative system that works by using essential data aggregation, transformation, integration and routing.

North Carolina based open source champion Red Hat and Camaro based machine to machine (M2M) system maker Eurotech say they have two objectives for the IoT: simplify and accelerate. They aim to combine open source cloud software and M2M platforms into a single architecture that bridges the gap between operational and information technology.

All the inherent weaknesses of the IoT – from its lack of scalability to its insecurity – can be tackled by pushing computing power to the network edge, according to the partners. This will help IoT project managers to avoid the risk of shipping masses of data to the cloud for real-time processing. With all the essential data aggregation, data transformation, integration and routing taking place locally, and less exposed to a journey across the cloud, security and performance can be tightened up.

Another productivity dividend will come from placing the processes close to the operational devices. By devolving power away from the centre and allowing remote devices to trigger business rules the partners aim to automate greater numbers of machine processes.

The foundations of this new architecture will be Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux and JBoss Middleware along with Eurotech’s Everyware Software Framework and Everyware Cloud. These are to be integrated to provide the security, management and application support spanning the whole hierarchy of the cloud from device tier to the data centre, according to a Red Hat statement.

“Open Source and Java are important pillars in both our strategies. These factors ensure a good alignment,” said Eurotech CMO Robert Andres, CMO, Eurotech.