Disrupting the Disrupter (Cloud) with the Intelligent Edge

We are all living in an era of continuous innovation and digital transformation. It very likely that if you are not disrupting, you risk being disrupted. Cloud today continues to drive the most impactful change in the Industry with everyone focused on leveraging cloud to improve the business agility, Innovation and above all, look at new ways to interact and provide differentiated services and experience to its clients. The use of technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and IoT has rendered traditional businesses redundant and made a paradigm shift in the way business look at client experience.

The rise of connected devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) has created an enormous amount of data. As per most of the studies, 80-90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone which is growing at 2-3 quintillion bytes of data a day. The Internet of Things (IoT) is much more than just connecting devices to gather data, it’s about generating new business insights, enhancing customer experience and automating business and production processes to accelerate innovation cycles. The vast array of IoT implementations are difficult to comprehend, as they can encompass everything from factories that run with little staff to smarter cities to virtual reality assisted repairs and medical procedures.

Today, the cloud is viewed as an essential driver of disruption and helping clients to be nimble, information driven and future ready. However, it may not be any longer as the two most significant technological innovations of the last few years Edge computing and 5G networks along with IoT is likely to disrupt the cloud. 5G promises a revolution in ultra-reliable, high-speed and low-latency, wireless connectivity.

Edge computing fundamentally brings computation and data storage closer to the devices where it’s being gathered, instead of sending it to a central location that can be hundreds or thousands of miles away. This is helpful as the data, especially real-time data, does not suffer latency issues that can affect an application’s performance or decision taking response time. In addition, companies can save money by having the processing done locally, reducing the amount of data that needs to be processed in a centralized or cloud-based location.

Why does Edge Computing and 5G matter?

Edge computing brings compute as close to the data as possible. It does so by using small power cell stations to enable data to travel at high speeds—without having to travel long distances to a cloud or data center. What this translates to in real life is very small, prefabricated data centers close to where the data is getting generated. Let’s take a use case to understand the importance of edge computing and the role of 5G in that. While the use case is for the autonomous vehicle, it is like any other use case for connected mines, connected retail or connected cities.

When driving a vehicle, it’s the human reaction time that matters which is in milliseconds. Autonomous vehicles are no different, even though it is driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI) which requires your compute to be as close to your data as possible to provide real time data insights to enable real time decisions and actions. We need to look at how long it takes for the message to be transmitted from car IoT sensors to the main controller and then for the computer to decide. All of this must be in less time than a human would take to decide which is 2 milliseconds.  

Autonomous vehicles have 2 key connectivity – vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Everything (V2X). There are several components of V2X, including vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P), and vehicle-to-network (V2N) communications. In this complex ecosystem, autonomous vehicles will talk to other vehicles, to infrastructure such as traffic lights or parking spaces, to smartphone-toting pedestrians, and to cloud/datacenters via cellular networks. Similarly, within V2V connectivity, Accelerometer and Gyrometer in an autonomous vehicle generate the required alerts to maintain the safe driving standards. Data is also monitored at a high sampling rate in order to detect any sudden acceleration, instantaneous braking, car crashes, need of airbags, etc. Since all communication in autonomous vehicles creates binary data, it creates a huge amount of data which must be analyzed and actioned in real time. It is expected that an autonomous car will produce almost 30TB of data per day.

The current 4G network is simply not fast enough to provide the capability to give autonomous vehicles human-like reflexes for data processing. Enter 5G. The three major differences between 4G and 5G are faster speeds, higher bandwidth and lower "latency," or lag time in communications between devices and servers. 5G promises an ultra-reliable, high-speed, low-latency, power-efficient, high-density wireless connectivity enabling large-scale machine-to-machine communication and massive IoT sensor deployments. With 5G claiming to reach 10 gigabits per second, it’s up to almost 100 times faster than 4G - the level of performance needed for an increasingly connected society. Similarly, with 2-5 ms latency, its faster than the blink of an eye. However, these are all theoretical claims which need to be tested in real life scenarios. From a digital disruption perspective, the biggest advantage of 5G over 4G is the improvement in the device density. 5G could support up to 100 times more devices than 4G (One Million devices/Sq. Mi) – leading to a world more connected than ever. This is critical as billions of IoT devices come online and put a strain on the existing 4G networks. All this coupled with a claim of 90% lower power consumption, 5G could be a game changer for the next wave of digital disruption as energy consumption has a big impact on battery life for mobile devices. It’s been a thorn in the side for people using smartphones, smartwatches, and tablets. By using fast, low latency 5G networks, more data could be processed in the network instead of on a device. That could mean less energy used and longer battery lives.

Summary

The opportunities to transform the business leveraging IoT and AI are endless, and the digital disruptors are using it effectively to digitally transform their business. This includes everything from connected retail to connected healthcare and connected mines. Edge computing presents an exciting new computing paradigm to support growing geographically distributed data and data processing for IoT and augmented reality applications. With 5G rollout, edge computing adoption will gain speed. However, like VDI did not replace desktops or laptops, edge computing will also complement and not replace cloud. Most businesses will use a combination of both depending on the use case - processing some data locally (for agility and precision) and majority on the cloud. It’s the combination of cloud and edge computing which will transform the business and deliver true client value and experience.