Securing communications with IoT devices

I’m trying to figure out if Consul OSS is suited to this application or not. I have many (potentially thousands) of rugged computers collecting data from industrial devices and uploading it to the cloud. I was thinking if you installed Consul on each computer and treated them as a “data center” you could use the mesh gateway to secure communications between each computer and the cloud. I’m getting the feeling this is an unusual use case though.