Design a secure IoT solution with Azure Sphere

  • 2 minutes

Designing a secure IoT solution

In the scenario, your goal is to maintain ambient room conditions accurately within a laboratory. Doing so will ensure that your test results will be accurate and stable. The system you'll build should automatically read the data and transmit it securely from the device to the cloud. To accomplish the requirement, you'll create a secure IoT solution to run on Azure Sphere.

Components to use

You'll clone the Azure Sphere Developer Learning Path, configure your application, and deploy it to the Azure Sphere device by using Visual Studio Code.

To accomplish this, you'll use the Azure Sphere MT3620 board to:

  1. Act as a room environment monitor. You'll deploy an Azure Sphere application on the Azure Sphere board. It will read and transmit environment telemetry data to the cloud so that you'll be able to monitor and analyze the data from the cloud.
  2. Additionally, you can control your room environment from the cloud. You can specify a threshold for any of the defined variables to maintain stable room conditions with a virtual "Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC)" unit to automatically adjust the environment to match the requirements for lab experiments.

The components you'll use are:

  • Azure Sphere MT3620 board: MT3620 is the first Azure Sphere-certified MCU, a secured, connected crossover microcontroller used by this lab.
  • Azure Sphere Developer Learning Path: The labs in this learning path are designed to ease you into the world of Azure Sphere development with the Avnet and Seeed Studio Azure Sphere development boards. The labs cover Azure Sphere security concepts, secure bi-directional cloud communications, how to integrate Eclipse ThreadX real-time applications (formerly Azure RTOS ThreadX) with Azure, and over-the-air updates.

Important

The MT3620 platform is a lab target for learning and for maintaining existing Azure Sphere deployments. Microsoft announced Azure Sphere retirement on March 20, 2026; MT3620 reaches end of life on July 31, 2026; and extended support for Azure Sphere OS and the Azure Sphere Security Service ends on July 31, 2031. New product designs should account for these dates and evaluate replacement architectures, including supported secure MCUs, device identity, update, and Azure IoT connectivity options. For details, see Retirement of Azure Sphere.