Data is at the heart of any organization, and its future is beating to a different drum: moving away from cloud to the edge. GDS recently conducted several Meet the Boss virtual roundtables on this important tech trend.
Defining the Edge
So, what is edge computing, and why has it become so wildly popular? Edge computing is a distributed information technology (IT) architecture in which data is processed as close to the originating source as possible, or in other words, near the edge.
According to Gartner, “around 10% of enterprise-generated data is created and processed outside a traditional centralized data center or cloud.” By 2025, Gartner says the figure will grow to 75%. Furthermore, a recent IDC report found worldwide spending on edge computing is expected to be $176 billion in 2022, an increase of nearly 15% over last year. You may ask, what’s driving the rapid transition to edge computing? There are several factors.
Speed & Latency
Arguably the biggest driving factor pushing us to the edge is the need for speed and a decrease in latency. According to Network World, “the ongoing global deployment of the 5G wireless standard ties into edge computing because 5G enables faster processing for these cutting-edge, low-latency use cases and applications.”
Industry experts say the explosion of new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) is also accelerating the need to host more computing at the edge. Edge computing gives businesses the capability to operate faster, safer, and more efficiently.
The global market for edge data centers is reportedly expected to nearly triple, from $4 billion in 2017, to $13.5 billion in 2024. PwC says this is due to “the potential for these smaller, locally located data centers to reduce latency, overcome intermittent connections and store and compute data close to the end user.”
Bandwidth Limitations
Bandwidth limitations are another big factor driving the move to edge. Bandwidth is the volume of information that can be sent over a connection in a measured amount of time, usually calculated in megabits per second. Nearly all networks have a limited bandwidth. By processing data at the edge, industry experts at Hazelcast say “an organization can ensure its only pays to transmit and store its necessary, valuable data while simply discarding low-value data.”
This piece from Xailient explains it well, expressing in part, “computing at the edge means less data transmission as most of the heavy lifting is done by the edge devices. Instead of sending the raw data to the cloud, most of the processing is done at the edge, and only the result is sent to the cloud, thus requiring less data transmission bandwidth.”
Resiliency
Edge technology is the future. It’s here to stay. Just take a look at its widespread use across industries such as healthcare and manufacturing.
Dave McCarthy is research vice president of Cloud and Edge Infrastructure Services at IDC. He says, “the diverse needs of edge deployments have created a tremendous market opportunity for technology suppliers as they bring new solutions to market, increasingly through partnerships and alliances.” IDC further expects “hardware and services spending will account for 85% of all edge spending in 2022 with the remainder going to software.”
At the start of the decade, there was a transformational movement away from on-premises computing to cloud computing. Now, we are witnessing another major shift, this one from cloud computing to edge computing.
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