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Fremont, CA 19 October 2022 – ZPE Systems announces the Mini SR, a smartphone-size, cloud-orchestrated gateway that solves the operational challenges of running security and connectivity at the network edge.

Organizations must solve evolving business needs by deploying applications and devices at locations including branch offices, third-party manufacturing sites, powerplants, emergency response locations, and urgent care facilities. Even with cloud SaaS-based applications, organisations still require equipment, and they typically outsource to MSPs and MSSPs who can manage the SLA and operational challenges presented by this physical stack. These providers need a simple platform to host third party applications, enable remote operation, and ensure security. The Mini SR solves this problem.

Roughly the size of an iPhone, this cloud-managed, out-of-band gateway collapses multiple boxes. The Mini SR delivers wired and wireless connectivity, hosts third-party security apps and critical tools, and provides centralised cloud orchestration. Its fanless, ruggedised design can be tucked away and extends management capabilities via physical Gigabit Ethernet and USB interfaces, offering remote access via ZPE Cloud.

The Mini SR is ideal for MSPs/MSSPs and for following use cases:

1. Out-of-band edge rack management with environmental sensor support
2. SASE/SSE on-ramp for Netskope, Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma Access, and Zscaler connectors
3. Secure IoT/OT gateway with simple cloud orchestration
4. Secure work-from-anywhere gateway (home, car, temp office)
5. Police/emergency response (in-vehicle edge compute router)
6. SCADA industrial OT/IoT zero-trust, pico segmentation gateway
7. Medical and industrial device cloaking to prevent detection and exploitation during hacker reconnaissance scans
8. SaaS applications requiring a box to host agents for vulnerability scanning, experience monitoring, and critical DDI (DHCP/DNS/IPAM) services

The Mini SR was designed after collaborating with industry tech giants, who during the pandemic needed a secure resilience solution for their sprawling IoT and OT infrastructures. This compact gateway connects, controls, and isolates critical assets via out-of-band (OOB) management. This secure path uses the Mini SR’s Wi-Fi, LTE, or Ethernet connections to establish a tunnel or connect to zero trust destinations, keeping management traffic separate & secure.

Joe Quenneville, CEO of security service provider CyberGRC, states, “The Mini SR is perfect for managing remote manufacturing equipment, SCADA systems, medical imaging devices, and even oil & gas equipment sensors. It lets my IT team get inside their distributed systems without having to physically be on site.”

Matt Robinson, CTO of Rahi, says, “The Mini SR makes life easy for MSPs and VARs managing remote branch offices or industrial locations. It gives actionable observability into the environment for quick troubleshooting and recovery without requiring an on-site resource. The Mini SR’s out-of-band and hosted tools let teams remotely rebuild entire stacks of infrastructure, making efficient use of smart hands resources. We anticipate savings ranging from $600 to $4,000 on each smart ticket incident.”

Koroush Saraf, ZPE Systems’ VP of marketing and product management, explains, “Anyone considering Raspberry Pi or Intel NUC needs the Mini SR instead. Many IT use cases and SaaS services require a physical device on premises to act as the hosting platform or cloud gateway, and this device needs to be regularly updated with the latest patches. The entire Nodegrid SR fleet, including the Mini SR, can be upgraded and orchestrated from ZPE Cloud just like iPhone users receive updates from the App Store. The Mini SR connects to ZPE Cloud via out-of-band to keep its OS and guest applications up to date.”

The Mini SR uses the Intel x86 CPU and is preloaded with Nodegrid OS, which combines secure cloud out-of-band management and an open platform with the ability to run your preferred VMs, Docker containers, and LXC applications. The device also accommodates Nodegrid’s environmental sensors and feeds data to Nodegrid Data Lake for analytics. These integrations increase uptime by giving visibility into infrastructure heat, moisture, dust, device tampering, user experience, and hidden machine log data. On top of this the SR family incorporates encrypted disk and secure boot to prevent tamper and supply chain risks are detected and thwarted. Organisations can now cut downtime by 50% or more, predictably configure and scale sites in hours, and keep edge users connected without interruption.

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