colocation & outsourcing
CLOSER TO THE EDGE
As enterprises demand faster access to applications and ever more
processing power, Daniel Beazer of Cogeco Peer 1 discusses
the range of benefits of storing data in an edge data centre.
T
he physical nature of
Internet infrastructure is
changing. The explosion
of the cloud, the arrival
of the Internet of Things
(IoT) and the sheer amount of data we
send and stream over the Internet has
created the need to move the Internet’s
‘edge’ closer to where the users are.
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The most recent figures from the
Office of National Statistics show
that the Internet was accessed every
day, or almost every day, by 78 per
cent of adults (39.3 million) in Great
Britain in 2015, compared with 35
per cent (16.2 million) in 2006,
when directly comparable records
began. This is putting huge strain
on Internet infrastructure and, as a
result, has led to the rise of the edge
data centre. An ‘edge data centre’ is
a facility located away from the big
metropolitan hubs, like Silicon Valley,
New York or London, that brings
together content providers and major
networks, extending the ‘edge’ of
the web.