Laura Chirca – NEURER BUSINESS SOLUTIONS We’ve seen several IoT based door access control hacks over the years at TADHack. INOVO is making this a commercial reality for its customers in Romania and beyond. It’s a great example of the migration from hack to business, and the power of the democratization in telecoms enabling people to create solutions for their customers that fit their specific local needs. The Cloud Control Access System opens doors with cards, codes, phones, and SMS. The prototype starts with physical door controllers (the first release is Arduino-based), then migrates to intermediate building proxies that hold the customers’ database in case the internet goes down (a reality most businesses face several times a year) and them migrating to a scalable cloud authentication and portal layer.

1. Cloud Access
Control
Platform
Challenges in deploying an IoT Cloud
Platform
20th of November 2019, London
Neurer Business Solutions - Laura Chirca, Business Development Manager

2. Agenda Who we are
Innovation approach
Product Architecture
Struggles
Future plans
Insights

3. Who we are
Laura Chirca: Software and business consultant. Worked for Oracle, PwC, FISERV
2014 - Co-Founder and Business Development Manager of
NEURER
The company: Small-size, IT&C, based in Bucharest, ROMANIA.
Our Products: Infrastructure as a Service, VPS, VDS, Disaster Recovery, Email Delivery
Platforms (corporate servers, transactional, newsletter)

4. “Technology is
opening the
doors to endless
possibilities”
State the problem you are solving
in one or two sentences.
Make sure to explain why it is a real
problem.

5. … but what is the
technology
behind the
actual opening
of the doors?
State the problem you are solving
in one or two sentences.
Make sure to explain why it is a real
problem.

6. What is
Innovation?
Justify your effort to try to solve
the problem.
Highlight the pain points of the current
solution or how customers deal with not
having a solution to the problem.
- Not always a new idea
- Not always disruptive
- Sometimes just a new
approach on something
that already exists

7. What you see
Justify your effort to try to solve
the problem.
Highlight the pain points of the current
solution or how customers deal with not
having a solution to the problem.
What lies
beneath

8. - Decentralised system
- Impossible to scale
- Difficult to provision
users across multiple
sites
- Difficult to integrate with
other systems
- No modern
authentication
technologies (two factor,
smartphone app with
NFC…)
Old versus Modern approach

9. Today’s challenges
- Centralised system and
information from anywhere
across the world
- Unlimited doors, buildings,
locations
- Real time provisioning of
users across buildings and
regions
- Integrated with any ERP or
core system (HRMs,
Payroll)
- Multiple authentication
methods available

10. Our approach

11. Building Server - Architecture

12. Building Server - Message Data Flows

13. Cloud Platform - Architecture

14. Cloud Platform - Data Flows

15. Building Server:
- Mosquito
- Docker
- Java App
- Mongo DB
Technology Stack
Door Controller:
- Arduino
- Raspberry
Cloud Logic:
- OTA System
Mender
- Log System
Logz.io
- Kafka
- PosgresSQL
- TimescaleDB
Cloud CCA
Platform:
- ??
Our own cloud:
- Vcenter
Cloud Access
Control
Technology Stack

16. Building Server:
- Mosquito
(MQTT)
- Docker
- Java App (Spring
framework)
- MongoDB
- Raspberry Pi
Cloud Access Control Technology Stack
Door Controller:
- Arduino
- C
Cloud Platform:
- Kafka
- PostgreSQL
- TimescaleDB
- Java (Spring
framework)
- Swagger
- Mender
Our own cloud:
- VmWare
- VyOS
- Mikrotik
- Kubernetes

17. Technology Stack
Java, a top programming language with a long history behind, stability and widespread are it’s main
advantages and it’s used as backend and for data processing projects
Spring framework, most used java general purpose framework. Or Devs love it.
Swagger a visual tool that allows easy integration for API’s, it facilitates communication between
teams, implements OpenAPI standard
ReactJs the most popular javascript library for implementing one page applications, has a large
community, lots of support and it promotes a decoupling from the DOM model
Kafka a scalable widely used message broker, acts as the glue between different parts of the systems,
enable async processing of information
PostgreSQL a relational SQL compliant database that support scaling .It has been around since 1996,
and it’s arguably in front of MySQL as adoption rate
TimescaleDB a time series database, it’s scalable and fully support SQL sytax and features, it’s
“backend” it’s made of PostgreSQL servers so it sits in top of a super tested and used technology
Docker probably the most popular container system used today, enables system decoupling from
phisical resources

18. Technology Stack
Kubernetes a platform for managing containerized services, it has a growing traction in the industry
and simplifies deployments and working on multiple environments with little configuration
Mosquitto an open source MQTT broker, it is lightweight and simple to configure, suitable for IOT
devices like ours
MongoDB a document based database, although it’s a very powerful tool, our usage it’s limited to
store data for the local building server. Our reasons: it’s easy to model the data, use it’s API and it has a
lot of features
Mender.io it’s a OTA (over the air) updates system for operating systems. It has a smart fool proof
method of deploying the image using a dual boot. Really necessary if you have multiple devices (servers)
running in remote locations. We are using it for our Raspberry pi fleet
Arduino and Raspberry PI, two of the most used development boards in the hobby community,
although we may upgrade them in the future releases they have helped us kickstarting the project. The
power of the community was awesome and we had delivered a working demo of the product in a short
time

19. Commercial model
SaaS monthly subscription
On existing customers we only replace the door controllers. Keep the card
readers and the the existing door lockers.
Customer Advantages:
- No (or minimal) investment in hardware
- No need to manage the system
- Opex instead of Capex
- Pay per use model - add buildings and users on the go
- Full automation with existing HRM and Payroll systems

20. Wireframes - UX matters in B2B as well

21. Struggles
- Choosing the right technology stack
- Low cost Performant Hardware
prototypes
- Devs and Devops - synergies that can
develop into dissensions
- Choose the minimal set of features
for our first MVP (minimum viable
product)
- Running it in our own “cloud”
infrastructure
- Keeping the architecture clean,
microservice-divided and easy to
migrate to AWS/Google/Azure

22. Inside our Lab

23. Inside our Lab

24. Where we are
Jan 2019 July 2019
Project
Start
MVP
Nov 2019
Beta
version
First
customer
Feb 2020

25. Future Plans
- The first customer: a chain of dental clinics
- Integrate as many HRMs and Payroll systems as possible
- Integrate Video and do some AI on the video recording
like analysing who’s entering or getting out of the doors
- Launch the android and ios mobile apps
- Looking for partners across different markets

26. Thank you! Questions?
laura.chirca@neurer.ro
+40720300183