FEATURE: EDGE COMPUTING
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The growth of data
produced by IoT and
other technologies is
forcing infrastructure
to shift to the Edge –
a term described by
Gartner as ‘the physical
location where things and
people connect with the
networked digital world’.
Andy Rowland, Head of
Customer Innovation:
Energy, Resources and
Manufacturing, BT,
explores Edge Computing
in more detail.
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What is Edge Computing?
For the past five years we’ve all been talking
about the cloud. It’s become all pervasive
as companies move to consumption-based
pricing and we’ve watched the meteoric rise
of the hyper-scalers like Amazon, Microsoft
and Google.
And that’s despite the cynic’s view that ‘the
cloud is simply a data centre that nobody is
supposed to know where it is’.
Currently, around 10% of enterprise-
generated data is created and processed
outside a traditional centralised data centre
or cloud. By 2022, Gartner predicts this figure
will reach 50%, with a great deal of interest
in Edge Computing, where data is stored
and processed very close to its point of
consumption and/or creation; a factory, an
oil rig, a retail outlet or even a container ship.
So why is this suddenly getting
so much interest?
The main reason that companies are looking
at Edge Computing is due to the sheer
volume of data created by the Internet of
Things (IoT) and specifically Industry 4.0,
where companies stream data from sensors
to help them become more efficient.
As an example, a typical oil rig contains
20,000 sensors – that’s a lot of data.
Using the cloud to process all this data poses
a number of problems. Firstly, there is the
matter of latency; can you really afford to
send time or safety critical data all the way
to the cloud for analysis and then back again
to site? Then there is the cost of transporting
all that data. And of course, there is security
and regulatory compliance to consider.
How can Edge Computing help?
When dealing with a massive amount of
data, having the ability to analyse and filter
the data before sending it can lead to huge
savings in network and computing resources.
Are we all
teetering on
the Edge?
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