Datacenter Architecture shifts from Cloud Computing to Edge Computing

This week Amazon Web Services announced datacenter investments in Nordics with plans to open three datacenters in Stockholm next year. Since 2006 AWS has disrupted datacenter service industry and it’s very realistic to expect 50% of the Nordic workloads to be moved from private cloud to public cloud sooner than later. Naturally this is bad news for Nordic datacenter service providers who are already struggling to keep customers.

However, the industry will be changing soon again as the data flow is and workloads are moving away from centralized datacenters to decentralized model which means that information is collected and processed locally or at the edge of the network. In practice this means that data collection devices are IoT sensors connected to drones, self-driving cars, cloud controlled robotics and even smaller things such as sensors in running shoes. The faster the provided data can be analyzed, faster we get messages such as: ‘slow down, there is a pump on the road’, or ‘speed up, you are behind our daily running target’.

Focus Industries for Edge Computing

Industries which are likely to pick up edge computing fastest are going to be transportation, manufacturing, energy and utilities. Even this year we are going to witness major disruption of gaming in form of Hatch, which enables real-time social multi-player gaming experience with smart phones.

BI Intelligence estimates that by 2020 there will be 5.6 billion IoT devices owned enterprises and governments utilizing edge computing for data collection and processing. All of this will mean significant data growth and variety of data transferred back to datacenters. The data will collected using industrial gateway devices, industrial PC or micro datacenters.

Invest on Edge Computing

I believe the shift will start with NB-IoT network technologies and blow of the roof when 5G takes over as the default wireless network standard. 5G will enable innovations we cannot even think of at the moment. Various technologies vanish and are replaced with new innovations.

NOW it’s the time for data center service providers and telecom carriers to invest in technologies which enable future growth for their customers. Ability to provide real-time data-analysis and collect unstructured is a real value proposition for your customers who are looking to move to public cloud. New services enabling IoT innovation are key for building future business growth.

Thank you for reading. In upcoming articles I will focus on technologies enabling transformation from cloud computing to edge computing - so stay tuned and please don't hesitate to contact me for technology chat or business opportunities.