What Is an OEM Scan Engine?

An OEM scan engine is the part that is integrated into your barcode scanning device that decodes different barcode labels in your business operations. These scan engines can be used for your 1D and 2D scanning, images, signatures, RFID tags, direct part marks, and more. With 1D and 2D scan engines, you can quickly and cost-effectively integrate industry-leading barcode scanning into your products at whatever range is required. One of the key advantages of OEM scan engines is the ease with which you can stay up-to-date with the latest technological advancements. By leveraging these scan engines, you can effortlessly incorporate the latest scanning technology into your devices, enabling you to offer customers cutting-edge features and maintain a competitive edge in the market. Whether you require scan engines for fixed-mount scanners, OEM handheld scanners, OEM micro kiosks, OEM RFID products, or OEM mobile computers, these highly adaptable components can be seamlessly implemented, allowing you to create a wide range of products equipped with top-notch scanning capabilities tailored to your customers' needs.

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What Are the Different Types of OEM Scan Engines?

In the world of barcode scanning technology, there exist three primary types of scan engines: laser, linear imager and area imager. These distinct scan engines have been designed to cater to the specific requirements of diverse industries and environments. By employing different approaches, they efficiently address the unique challenges presented by various use cases. OEM solutions offer customizable and integrated technology solutions that empower businesses to enhance their products, improve efficiency and meet specific industry needs. Let's explore the characteristics of each scan engine type and understand how they play a crucial role in meeting the demands of different sectors.

1. Array Imager Scan Engines

Array imager scan engines are one of the most versatile, depending on the solution you are looking for. They are ideal for both enterprise and consumer use. Array imagers come with the capability to handle OCR, document and image capture with a scanning range that varies from near to extended based on your operational needs. These engines can be implemented in a variety of uses such as demanding industrial environments, mobile computers, medical and diagnostic instruments, lottery and payment terminals, PRZM barcode capture, gaming, banking, mobile POS devices, scanning sleds/sleeves, kiosks, access control systems, and consumer devices.

2. Linear Imager Scan Engines

Linear imager scan engines offer cost-effective 1D scanning solutions for a diverse range of products. These engines consist of a single, integrated unit featuring an onboard decoder and serial host interface. Their compact and low-profile design makes them particularly suitable for space-constrained products. Primarily designed for consumer applications, these scan engines provide reliable scanning capabilities within a standard range. Their versatility extends to applications such as medical equipment, test tube barcode scanning, time card management, identity verification, gate access control and lottery kiosks.

3. Laser Scan Engines

Laser scan engines are 1-piece engines with a serial host interface. These are designed for enterprise and consumer use and provide standard and mid-range scanning capabilities. The engines can be implemented in handheld mobile computers, medical instruments, diagnostic equipment, lottery terminals, and robotics solutions.

Where Can an OEM Solution Be Applied?

OEMs in Retail and Hospitality

Keep customers’ business operations up to date well into the future – quickly, reliably and cost-effectively. This solution a help extend your brand identity, and enhance your offerings. In the fast-paced and customer-centric hospitality and retail sectors, it is crucial for businesses to stay current with the latest technologies and trends. OEM solutions enable businesses to integrate advanced data capture, tracking and management capabilities seamlessly into their operations. This integration can help businesses enhance their offerings by streamlining processes, improving operational efficiency and delivering a superior customer experience. By keeping their operations up to date, businesses can meet the changing demands of their customers and gain a competitive edge in the market. 

With OEM solutions, businesses can efficiently adopt new technologies without incurring excessive costs or facing complex implementation challenges. By providing reliable and scalable solutions, OEM solutions enable businesses to achieve innovation while maximizing their return on investment.

OEMs in Healthcare

OEM solutions help improve patient safety, increase staff productivity and meet regulatory requirements, quickly and cost-effectively. OEM solutions provide advanced capabilities that enable accurate and efficient data capture throughout healthcare workflows. By seamlessly integrating barcode scanning, RFID technology and other data capture functionalities into medical devices, OEM solutions empower healthcare professionals to effectively track and manage patient information, medication administration, specimen identification and more. This ensures that the right treatments, medications, and procedures are administered to the correct patients, minimizing the risk of errors and enhancing patient safety. 

OEM solutions can also help increase staff productivity within healthcare environments. By automating data capture processes and eliminating manual data entry tasks, healthcare professionals can save valuable time and allocate it to providing quality care to patients. Advanced OEM scanning technologies and seamless integration into medical devices enable quick and accurate capture of information, allowing staff members to efficiently perform tasks such as inventory management, asset tracking and patient identification. This can help streamline workflows, reduce administrative burden and enable healthcare professionals to focus more on patient care.

OEMs in Technology and mPOS

Complement your payment solution with reliable, secure and affordable OEM technology that will aid in customer experiences faster and friction-free. speed and efficiency are critical in processing transactions. OEM scanning solutions are specifically engineered to meet high demands by delivering fast and accurate data capture capabilities. With advanced barcode scanning technology, businesses can quickly and seamlessly capture payment information, reducing transaction times and ensuring a smooth checkout process for customers. This enables businesses to deliver a friction-free experience, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

OEM scanning solutions can also incorporate robust security features, such as encryption and authentication, to safeguard sensitive payment data. By integrating secure OEM scanning solutions into their payment systems, businesses can provide a higher level of data protection, mitigating the risk of unauthorized access or data breaches. This instills trust in customers and ensures compliance with industry regulations. Businesses can also leverage reliable and advanced scanning technology without straining their budgets. The affordability of OEM solutions allows businesses to enhance their payment solutions and provide a superior customer experience without compromising their financial resources.

OEMs in Manufacturing

Increase productivity, product variants, visibility and flexibility in your manufacturing operations while reducing costs. OEM scan engines can quickly and accurately capture barcodes, facilitating rapid tracking and identification of products, components and materials throughout the production process. By integrating OEM scan engines into their manufacturing systems, businesses can minimize manual data entry, reduce errors and optimize workflow, leading to improved efficiency and increased productivity.

Visibility is crucial in modern manufacturing, and OEM scan engine solutions provide real-time data capture and visibility across the production floor. By capturing data at various checkpoints, such as material receiving, inventory management and production line stages, manufacturers gain valuable insights into their operations. This enhanced visibility enables proactive decision-making, faster response times and the ability to identify and address bottlenecks or inefficiencies promptly. With better visibility, manufacturers can optimize production schedules, allocate resources effectively and improve overall operational performance.

OEM scan engines can also be integrated into a wide range of manufacturing systems and devices, including handheld scanners, fixed-mount scanners, mobile computers and industrial automation equipment. This flexibility allows manufacturers to choose the most suitable form factor and deployment option for their specific needs. Whether it's for barcode scanning during assembly, inventory management, quality control, or tracking work-in-progress, OEM scan engine solutions offer the versatility required to adapt to diverse manufacturing environments and processes.

OEMs in Gaming and Lottery

Provide new barcode scanning and real-time data touch points for your gaming operators. Offer everything to ensure engaging and profitable guest or player experiences. OEM scanning solutions enable gaming operators to enhance the ticketing process by incorporating advanced barcode scanning technology. By integrating these scan engines into ticketing systems, gaming operators can swiftly and accurately scan tickets, vouchers or loyalty cards, ensuring smooth and efficient entry for guests or players. This streamlined ticketing experience minimizes wait times, reduces congestion and sets the stage for a positive and engaging gaming experience from the start.

OEM scanning solutions offer gaming operators the ability to provide a comprehensive range of services to guests or players. Beyond ticket validation, OEM scanning solutions can be used to facilitate cashless payments, track player activity and offer loyalty program benefits. OEM scanning solutions can easily capture barcodes, allowing seamless integration with existing gaming systems. By offering these additional touch points, gaming operators can enhance the overall guest experience, provide convenience and encourage increased engagement and spending. The seamless and efficient ticketing experience, made possible by OEM solutions, sets a positive tone for guests' overall gaming experiences.

OEMs in Ticketing

Give your customers seamless ticketing technologies for shorter queuing times, improved customer satisfaction and increased sales. In ticketing environments, long queues can lead to customer frustration and impact overall customer satisfaction. OEM scanning solutions address this challenge by offering fast and accurate data capture capabilities. By integrating these scan engines into ticketing systems, businesses can efficiently scan and process tickets, reducing queuing times and ensuring a smooth and seamless entry process for customers. The streamlined ticketing process not only enhances customer satisfaction but also maximizes operational efficiency by minimizing delays and congestion.

Businesses can leverage advanced OEM barcode scanning technology to enhance the customer experience. OEM scanning solutions can accurately capture and decode barcodes, enabling swift and reliable ticket validation. This ensures that tickets are quickly processed, minimizing wait times and allowing customers to enter events or venues with ease. By providing a seamless and efficient ticketing experience, businesses can leave a positive impression on customers, fostering increased loyalty and positive word-of-mouth recommendations. Businesses can create a frictionless ticketing experience that encourages customers to make impromptu purchases or attend additional events. The efficient and hassle-free ticket validation process, facilitated by OEM solutions, enhances customer convenience and encourages repeat business. Additionally, by reducing queuing times, businesses can accommodate more customers within a given timeframe, potentially increasing ticket sales and overall revenue.

OEMs in Quick Serve Restaurants (QSR)

Create self-service kiosk solutions for fast food restaurants, streamlining ordering, increasing revenues and meeting customer requests quickly and reliably. OEM scanning solutions enable the development of self-service kiosk solutions that enhance the ordering experience for customers. By integrating these scan engines into self-service kiosks, customers can easily navigate through menus, select their desired items and complete their orders with speed and convenience. This self-service approach minimizes wait times, reduces queues and empowers customers to customize their orders based on their preferences, dietary restrictions or special requests.

OEM scanning solutions can also accurately and swiftly capture barcodes, QR codes and other relevant information from menus, loyalty cards or digital coupons. This data capture capability eliminates manual entry errors and ensures precise and efficient order processing. The streamlined workflow leads to faster order fulfillment, allowing restaurants to serve more customers in less time and ultimately increase revenues. OEM scanning solutions offer flexibility and adaptability to the unique needs of quick-service restaurants. These solutions can be seamlessly integrated into a variety of self-service kiosk designs, ensuring compatibility with existing infrastructure or allowing for custom kiosk configurations. OEM solutions can help support various barcode and QR code formats commonly used in the restaurant and/or retail industry, providing versatile scanning capabilities for different menu items, loyalty programs or payment options.

Planning your Scan Engine Deployment

Your assessment of your security goals and your environment, including your asset inventory, will help you plan how and where to deploy Scan Engines. Keep in mind that if your asset inventory is subject to change on continual basis, you may need to modify your initial Scan Engine deployment over time.

Any deployment includes a Security Console and one or more Scan Engines to detect assets on your network, collect information about them, and test these assets for vulnerabilities. Scan Engines test vulnerabilities in several ways. One method is to check software version numbers, flagging out-of-date versions. Another method is a “safe exploit” by which target systems are probed for conditions that render them vulnerable to attack. The logic built into vulnerability tests mirrors the steps that sophisticated attackers would take in attempting to penetrate your network.

The application is designed to exploit vulnerabilities without causing service disruptions. It does not actually attack target systems.

One way to think of Scan Engines is that they provide strategic views of your network from an attacker’s perspective. In deciding how and where to deploy Scan Engines, consider how you would like to “see” your network.

View your network inside-out: hosted vs. distributed Scan Engines

Two types of Scan Engine options are available—hosted and distributed. You can choose to use only one option, or you can use both in a complementary way. It is important to understand how the options differ in order to deploy Scan Engines efficiently. Note that the hosted and distributed Scan Engines are not built differently. They merely have different locations relative to your network. They provide different views of your network.

Hosted Scan Engines allow you to see your network as an external attacker with no access permissions would see it. They scan everything on the periphery of your network, outside the firewall. These are assets that, by necessity, provide unconditional public access, such as Web sites and e-mail servers.

If your organization uses outbound port filtering, you would need to modify your firewall rules to allow hosted Scan Engines to connect to your network assets.

Rapid7 hosts and maintains these Scan Engines, which entails several benefits. You don’t have to have to install or manage them. The Scan Engines reside in continuously monitored data centers, ensuring high standards for availability and security.

With these advantages, it might be tempting to deploy hosted Scan Engines exclusively. However, hosted Scan Engines have limitations in certain use cases that warrant deploying distributed Scan Engines.

Distribute Scan Engines strategically

Distributed Scan Engines allow you to inspect your network from the inside. They are ideal for core servers and workstations. You can deploy distributed Scan Engines anywhere on your network to obtain multiple views. This flexibility is especially valuable when it comes to scanning a network with multiple subnetworks, firewalls, and other forms of segmentation.

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Scan Engines do not store scan data. Instead, they immediately send the data to the Security Console.

But, how many Scan Engines do you need? The question to ask first is, where should you put them?

In determining where to put Scan Engines, it’s helpful to look at your network topology. What are the areas of separation? And where are the connecting points? If you can answer these questions, you have a pretty good idea of where to put Scan Engines.

It is possible to operate a Scan Engine on the same host computer as the Security Console. While this configuration may be convenient for product evaluation or small-scale production scenarios, it is not appropriate for larger production environments, especially if the Scan Engine is scanning many assets. Scanning is a RAM-intensive process, which can drain resources away from the Security Console.

Following are examples of situations that could call for the placement of a Scan Engine.

Firewalls, IDS, IPS, and NAT devices

You may have a firewall separating two subnetworks. If you have a Scan Engine deployed on one side of this firewall, you will not be able to scan the other subnetwork without opening the firewall. Doing so may violate corporate security policies.

An application-layer firewall may have to inspect every packet before consenting to route it. The firewall has to track state entry for every connection. A typical scan can generate thousands of connection attempts in a short period, which can overload the firewalls state table or state tracking mechanism.

Scanning through an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) or Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) can overload the device or generate an excessive number of alerts. Making an IDS or IPS aware that Nexpose is running a vulnerability scan defeats the purpose of the scan because it looks like an attack. Also, an IPS can compromise scan data quality by dropping packets, blocking ports by making them “appear” open, and performing other actions to protect assets. It may be desirable to disable an IDS or IPS for network traffic generated by Scan Engines.

Having a Scan Engine send packets through a network address transition (NAT) device may cause the scan to slow down, since the device may only be able to handle a limited number of packets per second.

In each of these cases, a viable solution would be to place a Scan Engine on either side of the intervening device to maximize bandwidth and minimize latency.

VPNs

Scanning across virtual private networks (VPNs) can also slow things down, regardless of bandwidth. The problem is the workload associated with connection attempts, which turns VPNs into bottlenecks. As a Scan Engine transmits packets within a local VPN endpoint, this VPN has to intercept and decrypt each packet. Then, the remote VPN endpoint has to decrypt each packet. Placing a Scan Engine on either one side of the VPN tunnel or the other eliminates these types of bottlenecks, especially for VPNs with many assets.

Subnetworks

The division of a network into subnetworks is often a matter of security. Communication between subnetworks may be severely restricted, resulting in slower scans. Scanning across subnetworks can be frustrating because they are often separated by firewalls or have access control lists (ACLs) that limit which entities can contact internal assets. For both security and performance reasons, assigning a Scan Engine to each subnetwork is a best practice.

Perimeter networks (DMZs)

Perimeter networks, which typically include Web servers, e-mail servers, and proxy servers, are “out in the open,” which makes them especially attractive to hackers. Because there are so many possible points of attack, it is a good idea to dedicate as many as three Scan Engines to a perimeter network. A hosted Scan Engine can provide a view from the outside looking in. A local Scan Engine can scan vulnerabilities related to outbound data traffic, since hacked DMZ assets could transmit viruses across the Internet. Another local Scan Engine can provide an interior view of the DMZ.

ACLs

Access Control Lists (ACLs) can create divisions within a network by restricting the availability of certain network assets. Within a certain address space, such as 192.168.1.1/254, Nexpose may only be able to communicate with 10 assets because the other assets are restricted by an ACL. If modifying the ACL is not an option, it may be a good idea to assign a Scan Engine to ACL-protected assets.

WANs and remote asset locations

Sometimes an asset inventory is distributed over a few hundred or thousand miles. Attempting to scan geographically distant assets across a Wide Area Network (WAN) can tax limited bandwidth. A Scan Engine deployed near remote assets can more easily collect scan data and transfer that data to more centrally located database. It is less taxing on network resources to perform scans locally. Physical location can be a good principle for creating a site. See Configuring scan credentials. This is relevant because each site is assigned to one Scan Engine.

Other factors that might warrant Scan Engine placement include routers, portals, third-party-hosted assets, outsourced e-mail, and virtual local-area networks.

Deploying Scan Engine Pools

If your license enables Scan Engine pooling, you can use pools to enhance the consistency and speed of your scan coverage. A pool is a group of Scan Engines over which a scan job is distributed. Pools are assigned to sites in the same way that individual Scan Engines are.

NOTE

Pre-authorized AWS scan engine Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) cannot be added to Scan Engine pools.

Pooling provides two main benefits:

• Scan load balancing prevents overloading of individual Scan Engines. When a pool is assigned to a scan configuration of a site, scan jobs are distributed throughout the pool, reducing the load on any single Scan Engine. This approach can improve overall scan speeds.
• Fault tolerance prevents scans from failing due to operational problems with individual Scan Engines. If the Security Console contacts one pooled Scan Engine to start a scan, but the Scan Engine is offline, the Security Console simply contacts the next pooled Scan Engine. If a Scan Engine fails while scanning a given asset, another engine in that pool will scan the asset. Also, the application monitors how many jobs it has assigned to the pooled engine and does not assign more jobs than the pooled engine can run concurrently based on its memory capacity.

The algorithm for how much memory a job takes is based on the configuration options specified in the scan template.

You can configure and manage pools using the Web interface. See the Scan Engine Pools page for instructions. You also can use the extended API v1.2. See the API Guide.

Best practices for deploying and scaling pools

For optimal performance, make sure that pooled Scan Engines are located within the same network or geographic location. Geographically dispersed pools can slow down scans. For example, if a pool consists of one engine in Toronto and one in Los Angeles, and this pool is used to scan a site of assets located in Los Angeles, part of that load will be distributed to the Toronto engine, which will take longer to scan the assets because of the geographical distance.

To improve the performance of pools, you can add Scan Engines or increase the amount of RAM allocated to each pooled engine. By increasing RAM, you can increase the number of simultaneous sites that can be scanned and increase the number of assets that each engine scans simultaneously, which, in turn, expands the scanning capacity of the pool. See Working with scan templates and tuning scan performance.

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