Arti Loftus 
According to Grand View Research, the global smart factory market size was estimated at USD 154.89 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 10.0% from 2025 to 2030.
“The market is primarily driven by the increasing demand for automation and digital transformation, which enhances operational efficiency and reduces costs for manufacturers,” the authors of this recent study wrote. “In addition, the growing emphasis on energy efficiency and sustainability, coupled with advancements in technologies such as IoT, AI, and robotics, is propelling the adoption of smart factory solutions across various industries.
Furthermore, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies into edge devices and systems is facilitating smarter decision-making and predictive maintenance, which is expected to present lucrative opportunities for the smart factory industry in the coming years; in short, the many benefits of factory automation are obvious.
Scaling and securing these solutions in the real world is one of the greatest challenges, according to Jason Shepherd, founder and CEO of Atym – a software company with a WebAssembly-based solution that enables developers to develop, deploy, and manage containerized applications for billions of resource-constrained edge devices. Atym’s solution is built on an open-core model and leverages the Ocre device runtime from the Linux Foundation,
“Large manufacturing plants, having experienced tremendous value from ongoing investments in automation and robotics systems, are increasingly focused on enabling intelligence at the edge, where devices can be diverse and resource-constrained.” Shepherd said.”We’re seeing strong interest in WebAssembly-based containerization for embedded devices that don’t have the resources to support traditional containerization technologies like Docker. For the first time, we are able to enable containers on embedded devices that are written in a choice of programming language and simplify security implementation. This includes tapping into silicon-based root of trust (RoT) to support provisioning, code signing and certificates, establishing policy-based communication between containerized apps and underlying hardware, and so on. We can ensure secure code compilation and ensure that devices can only execute code that has been signed by a trusted source.”
“It’s critical to make sure container permissions are fully managed, with a device runtime that governs access to any system resource via fine-grained permissions, ensuring that all resources are accessed properly and protected,” Shepherd explained.
Trends Are Necessitating Change
“Two-thirds of the global edge footprint is composed of billions of embedded devices, ranging from discrete sensors, cameras, and industrial automation controllers to larger systems-of-systems such as appliances, robots, drones, and cars,” Shepherd explained. “These devices are typically powered by one or more microcontrollers (MCUs) or lightweight CPUs, running monolithic firmware or embedded Linux that has historically been time-consuming to develop and rigid to innovation.”
A number of macro trends are necessitating a change in how we approach embedded development. These trends are driving Atym’s development of its WebAssembly (Wasm)- based containerization solution, which helps organizations streamline development and enhance the cybersecurity posture of their connected products. Some of these trends include increasing device capability, the rise of edge AI, increasing cybersecurity challenges and regulations, and growing skill gaps.
When it comes to security regulations, Shepherd notes the upcoming Cyber Resiliency Act (CRA) and Software Bill of Materials (SBOM). These trends are especially forcing organizations to rethink how they approach their embedded development practices.
Core Embedded Security Challenges
Security is a cost center, and organizations must ” right-size” investments to ensure proper protections while maximizing profit, customer satisfaction, and compliance with regulations.
“Cybersecurity is especially challenging for embedded devices because they often don’t have sufficient hardware resources to protect themselves, lack robust authentication mechanisms, are physically accessible, run on untrusted networks, and are often inadequately tested due to resource limitations,” Shepherd said. “Compounding these challenges is that they are typically deployed across geographically diverse areas, which greatly increases the attack surface.”
Today, 99% of MCU-based devices are powered by firmware written in C/C++. These programming skills can be hard to come by, and development cycles are complex and long. The required investment has resulted in widespread legacy codebases that are especially vulnerable to exploits.
“Further complicating security (and performance) is that MCUs don’t have Memory Management Units (MMUs), meaning a single compromise in firmware provides attackers with access to the entire memory footprint. MPUs help but are limited in what they can do and are complicated to develop for,” Shepherd said.
Complexity is also driven by the heterogeneity of embedded edge devices compared to server, PC, and mobile hardware running Windows, Android, iOS, and Linux. MCU-based devices have wildly different silicon architectures with different tool sets and operating systems.
“MCUs require bare metal programming or building with Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS), have specialized I/O (e.g., serial, I2C) and related drivers, and may or may not have a silicon-based secure element like TPM to tap into for root of trust,” Shepherd explained. “On top of this, developers are working with kilobytes to megabytes of available memory – compared to the luxury of gigabytes available on hardware further upstream in the edge continuum.”
Intersection with WebAssembly
When it comes to containers enabled by Wasm, Shepherd pointed out that applications/modules can be sandboxed from the host and others by default, with access between apps only possible based on permissions. “When apps can only access specified device memory, they can’t do call stack jumps and create buffer overruns, and individual containers can be terminated if abnormal behavior is detected.”
In an upcoming article, Shepherd will dive deeper into the growing importance of securing resource-constrained edge devices and how WebAssembly-based containerization helps simplify compliance with security regulations like the CRA to further enable factories of the future.
