A consortium including Microsoft, Rockwell Automation, Siemens and others under the Joint Development Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation, is inviting peers to join the Margo initiative and contribute to building an effective interoperability standard that speeds up digital transformation.

WHY IT MATTERS

San Francisco-based Zededa, the edge computing firm serving multiple sectors, is the most recent to join the interoperability open standard effort.

From the Latin word for edge, Margo seeks to scale data exchange across multi-vendor environments by unlocking barriers to innovation.

The company, which leverages the open-source EVE from LF Edge in its edge orchestration platform, said it joined the steering committee to help develop the standard and deliver a compliance testing tool kit in an announcement last month. 

EVE-OS, an open Linux-based operating system, is a foundation for distributed edge deployments with any hardware, any application and in the cloud. It provides for remote control of edge devices and more, offering many capabilities – including automated patching for security updates.

"This type of open collaboration represents a major milestone in realizing the full potential of technologies like [artificial intelligence], machine learning and advanced analytics at the edge," Said Ouissal, the company's CEO and founder, said in the statement.

THE LARGER TREND

Darren Lacey, Johns Hopkins chief information security officer, said he is interested in ways open-source tooling and the rise of memory-safe languages can help improve health systems' cybersecurity postures.

He told Healthcare IT News in April that the foundational technologies underlying healthcare's IT infrastructure are critical for healthcare information, and that security leaders should be thinking about them as they manage cybersecurity.

"You would be hard-pressed to find any complex application that does not have dozens if not hundreds of open-source dependencies – from Linux to Apache to Kubernetes," Lacey said.

"More generally, memory safety represents one of a whole series of low-level technical considerations for evaluating and securing technology. Our attention to the ingredients of the stew are just as important as the stew itself."

ON THE RECORD

"The idea that users should be free to create the best solution for their needs without unnecessary constraints, costs or delays embodies the spirit of open-source collaboration," said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, when Margo launched in April.

"Microsoft is committed to align our adaptive cloud strategy architecture, such as Azure Arc and Azure IoT Operations, with the Margo initiative to help our customers build, deploy, and scale their applications faster, and run them both on the edge or in the cloud," said Christoph Berlin, general manager of Microsoft Azure in Margo's announcement. 

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.

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