Air-gapping your Edge

Some industries, such as chemical and petroleum refinement, manufacturing, and energy production, to name a few, have strict requirements that all processing must be performed at that site. This includes operations management. The entire site is isolated from the internet to prevent hacking that could undermine the integrity of their operations. In essence, a networking moat is created around the entire perimeter of the site.

We call this air-gapping that location.

In these cases, the entire Open Horizon management system, including the Management Hub, must be contained entirely within that site.

Fortunately, the IBM Edge Application Manager distribution of Open Horizon has been enhanced to support these environments. It requires the introduction of a bastion host.2 The bastion host then is used to mirror the software images for the products you will use, as well as any container registries you will depend on in the production environment.

2 ...