Cloud is shifting right to the edge

In recent years companies moved to the cloud mostly because they wanted to get rid of old datacenters, cut costs or to use innvotive services in the cloud.

Now there is another shift: The shift to the edge.

With new technologies there are now new technical capabilities available to be leveraged by companies. You may ask "what changed the situation that much"? Well, it starts with the increased maturity of network services, which started with more and more software defined networking (SDN) that allows flexible approaches to control network flows and management in a different way.

This is imporant because with edge-computing we are talking about huge amounts of data that needs to be securely transmited between devices at a networks edge and towards the cloud. This type of networking also gives the opportunity to scale rappidly and it can be used across many different types of devices.

Next there is 5G. Edge computing means we have connected things. These things might use mobile forms of communication (mobile networks), therefore a technology is required that can provide the bandwith to realize new business models. Benefits are e.g. faster responses, more reliability and better capacity through that for data processing edge cases. Cloud can be used with 5G very efficient now.

Everything I wrote until now leads to one thing: Everything is connected. With more and more machine-2-machine communication as well as human-2-machine communication that we see in mobile and IoT cases we allways need reliable and quick responses. This can only be achieved through this network capabilities. But thats not all. If we look at data then we all know it is only getting more and more. Luckily the storage is now less expensive and we have more processing power. Through the scalable and reliable data services offered by the cloud providers we have all the tools at hand to create data driven edge cases.

Connectivity + data processing and storage = good data driven business case?

Not yet. There is another critical piece. Applications can run on containers that are very scalable, secure, reliable and dont need expensive hardware investments. So looking at the architecture for modern edge cases we see growth and scalability is driven by software definded solutions and agility. Processing at the edge is less expensive then sending data to the cloud, so keep in mind to do the processing close to your data sources to get the best performance and cost benefit.

Now there is one more thing that is helping companies to get transparency into the value chain and to optimize using real-time data sets: Digital twins

Using digital twins can give real-time insights into data that is collected via sensors and can be monitored through dashboards. Through that problems can be identified before they are real problems and can then be fixed upfront. Decisions can be made near real-time and operational processes can be optimzied a lot quicker. Data-driven decision-making is especially critical for companies that produce physical goods in the fabrics.

Summary:

1. Use SDN
2. Explore 5G use-cases
3. Be data-driven (collect, analyze and monitor data) and use it to your advantage
4. Connect everything, but do it in a secure way