Small, low-power devices like sensors and security cameras are the most visible part of IoT, and they're right in ARM's wheelhouse as the dominant force in low-power chips, the company said. But ARM highlighted a cloud-based SaaS product rather than chips or edge devices themselves. IoT depends on back-end capabilities as much as edge devices, and the company says it wants to play a role in all of it.

The SaaS platform, called mbed Cloud, handles device connection and setup, encryption-key provisioning, and firmware updates. Anyone selling IoT devices or deploying them across an organization can use mbed Cloud for any or all of these functions, ARM says. With some extra work, it can serve non-ARM devices, too.

In recent DDoS attacks, hackers built botnets out of thousands of connected devices. Making them vulnerable were default passwords that were the same on every device, letting attackers take over the devices. So it's clear that some IoT manufacturers need help locking down products and keeping them secure, ARM executives said.

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