With the consumption of customer electronics growing steadily, the forecasts have been that around 50 billion IoT devices would be in use worldwide by 2030. Additionally, these numerous IoT devices are expected to create a massive web of interconnected devices spanning everything from smartphones to kitchen appliances. Here, while cloud computing will continue to play a vital role in driving the future of modern network architecture and for enterprises, edge computing will open up exciting possibilities. With edge computing, businesses will be able to process data closer to the source. What this also means is that businesses will have to relook at their IT infrastructure strategy.
Edge Computing – A topology
In a way, Edge Computing is opening up an opportunity for businesses to optimise their networks and move more processing power closer to a location where data is gathered at the network edge. So, when edge computing comes into play, data doesn’t have to travel back to the central server for the device to act. Hence, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that edge computing is primarily a topology, which is fast changing how the world of IT and business computing functions!
Exceptional efficiency
Edge computing has more relevance in 2021 than ever before as it ensures that the massive volumes of raw data are collected and protected by the local storage, as the local servers reduce the data by pre-processing it to assist swift decision-making. This technique enables the collection, filtering, processing, and analysis of data at the location, or near the network edge. It largely helps process large volumes of data in a way that is cost-efficient, technologically feasible, and more importantly sustainable. For what it’s worth, edge computing can offer exceptional efficiency by eliminating latency and congestion to the largest extent possible.
Now with the pandemic striking world over, the networking community all over the globe has been forced to digitize to a greater extent in 2020 and 2021. The pandemic has created an urgency to remodel how work, socializing, production, entertainment, and supply chains function. Despite decades of digitization efforts, with the pandemic upon us, digitization challenges have become obvious and ongoing.
Scalable and sustainable
Many companies and countries realize now, and those that have not yet digitized were hit hardest by the pandemic. With people leaning heavily on online digital solutions, internet infrastructure is at its capacity limit, users are seeing broadband speeds drop by as much as half. In countries like Europe, governments have even requested to reduce the quality of Netflix, Amazon Prime, Youtube, and other streaming services to improve network speed. These challenges demonstrate the growing need for an alternative to cloud computing. Cloud computing is an inherently centralized computing paradigm whereas Edge Computing is a decentralized topology that is based on keeping data local, at the ‘edge’ of the network, as close to the source as possible.
Edge Computing is ideal for data-intensive applications, have low latency requirements, or need to work offline, independent from a cloud connection. Using data on the edge, directly on or near the source of the data, not only increases the efficiency and speed of data use, but it reduces unnecessary network burden and data traffic waste.
As the world begins to recover from the coronavirus pandemic, we will see intelligent systems implemented across industries and value chains, accelerating innovation and alongside: data volumes and subsequent strain on network bandwidth. Thereby making Edge computing a key technology to ensure that this digitalization is both scalable and sustainable
A recent study also indicates a massive surge in the need to digitize, as a direct result of the pandemic. This is because the study speculates that a whopping 20 million IoT devices will be functional and a staggering 1.7MB of data will be created per second per person by 2025. In fact by 2025 75% of data will be processed at the edge compared to 10%
“Always-on” availability:
As data ingestion grows at the edge, inference and analytics must be performed at the point of action. A secure, reliable, and high-speed network is essential for moving the large amounts of data processed by these workloads. Edge computing is critical in current times as it creates new and improved ways to maximize efficiency, improve performance and safety and ensure “always-on” availability with very low latency.
Edge computing’s popularity is ever-growing due to the huge computing demands of cloud users and massive data explosion. The efficiencies in centralized cloud is becoming limited but this doesn’t mean cloud computing is going away, but rather cloud is coming near to you and the new opporutunities for cloud lies at the “edge”. This also means more end-points and it is vital that these end points are secured to mitigate cyber attacks. But done right edge computing has great potential to drive the next phase of digital infrastructure growth.
Head of Marketing , Acer India
