Design and manufacturing layer

The design and manufacturing layer consist of product conceptualization, business and technical requirements gathering, prototyping, product layout and design, component sourcing, manufacturing and distribution. Decisions made in each layer impact the next logical layers of the IoT workload described in the following sections. For example, some IoT device creators prefer to have a common firmware image installed and tested by the contract manufacturer. The decisions made at the design and manufacturing layer will partly determine what steps are required during the provisioning layer.

You may go a step further and provision and install an X.509 certificate and its private key to each device during manufacturing, or include a hardware security module with credentials already pre-provisioned. This decision can impact the provisioning and communications layers, since the type of credential can impact the subsequent selection of network protocols. If the credential never expires it can simplify the communications and provisioning layers at the possible expense of compromised security, data loss, or both.