Edge Computing – Fast Forward to Business Productivity
By Venkatraman Swaminathan, VP, Secure Power Division, Schneider Electric India
‘Time is money’ and most businesses swear by this code in order to stay relevant and profitable. In a bid to be more cost effective and time efficient, numerous businesses moved on to cloud computing, realising its benefits. However, realising the power of data processing and analysis to gain business intelligence was only the first stage of cloud transformation.The emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) and Data Organisation, not only facilitated businesses to enhance their operations, but also ensured lucrativeness. However, as more and more organisations joined the cloud computing bandwagon, a new type of issue arose out of the situation, that had to do with speed and strain on bandwidth.
To give a better perspective, in a cloud computing set up, data travelling from edge devices to the processing centers, consumed time. This caused delay of actionable information reaching businesses, adversely impacting quick decision making. Alongside, the back and forth of a huge amount of data between the processing center and edge device, put a lot of strain on bandwidth. This Low latency and High Volume Traffic, was causing the entire network to slowdown. Adding to the strain, as per Cisco Global Cloud Index, the deeply connected world of people, machine and things is projected to produce a whopping 800 zettabytes of data by 2020. With these projections, the volume of traffic is only going to increase. As businesses try to keep up with the fast paced world of Information technology, they demand more agile computing solutions with low latency and high reliability.
This emerging concerns underscored the changing technology trends and needs of businesses. Most growing and constantly evolving digital businesses warranted an always-on, highly available, secure and efficient solution to access information across enterprise, edge computing and cloud service providers. However, the increasing number of companies depending on Data Centers for data intelligence and management, hindered these centers from evolving as swiftly as business environment demanded. This led to the emergence of Micro Data Centers, which are easy to deploy and can be managed from remote locations. These Micro Data Centers rely on Edge Computing.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a new connectivity model, experts are predicting that it will add many billions of connected devices every year. This proliferation has led to a very much in-demand philosophy of edge computing, the idea that data can be kept closer to the edge of a network and further from core repositories. Edge Computing tackles latency issues by repositioning data analysis at the edge of the network. Unlike cloud computing that requires data to be delivered to the central server, Edge can gather and process data outside the processing center. This improved the response time and reduced data traffic flow to the centers, thereby reducing its impact on the network. The Micro Data Centers boast of standardized infrastructure, including software, cooling, PDU, UPS, and security that can be deployed at the edge locations fast and can be managed from a centralised data centre.
Processing data in the Micro Data Centers closer to the users, enable quick access to content for the consumers. This facilitates better service quality for the business, which in turn helps them expand and reach out to more consumers, without compromising on quality.
Unlike large businesses, smaller businesses are impacted slightly different by the delay in machine’s decision making, which could lead to major losses. Mostly constrained by financial reasons, it takes a downtime event or a series of close calls for small businesses to finally invest in improving the availability of IT operations. In many cases, this spurs new IT upgrade projects. An upgrade project is the optimum opportunity to assess the physical infrastructure required to support IT. Standing at the cusp of cloud transition, smaller businesses realised the importance of a renewed culture within companies. To that end, making course corrections, computing power and storage is being inserted out on the network edge in order to lower data transport time and increase availability.
Setting the tone of the future of Mircro Data Centers, Gartner in its report predicted that ‘By 2025, more than half of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside of traditional data centers and the cloud’. Adding to the insights, yet another report by Gartner stated that ‘75 percent of Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders are unprepared with the skills, behaviours and cultural presence needed over the next
2 – 3 years.’
Most IT managers often lack the time to research and specify an appropriate solution and the plan for deploying it. When organisations rely less and less on data centres, then securing the endpoint edge means encrypting communications and ensuring that security devices are able to inspect that encrypted data at network speeds. Likewise, businesses will need to conduct advanced data analysis to spot, prevent, and correct problems before they can escalate, putting the company in control and minimizing risk. All of this and much more in the evolving ecosystem of cloud, warrants adapting to new skills for data center management, with up skilling and reskilling. Some of the top skills required in cloud computing today are Database Skills, Programming Skills, Linux Skills, Developmental Operations, Quality Assurance and Information Security etc.
The extensive deployment of edge computing requires major power supply, which is surfacing as a major concern. Countering these issues and ensuring sustainability calls for a collaboration between energy supply system and edge computing system. A collaborative energy management framework, facilitating a sustainable edge computing, with distributed renewable energy resources is the need of the hours. This unified framework could enable energy utilization to the fullest, while enhancing service quality for time-constrained IoT applications. To that end, prototypes with micro grid and edge computing devices have been deployed in some parts of the world and the initial result show that these prototypes have all the capabilities required for running a reliable and sustainable edge computing facility.
Edge is essentially a part of every type of businesses today with tailor-made services such as Commercial Edge, Telco Edge and Industrial Edge and is constantly growing. Talking of India perspective, India’s major jewellery brand Tanishq by Titan recently took a major leap towards energy efficiency, with the integration of EcoStruxure Micro Data Center in its new retails stores across India. As per Allied Market Research, the edge computing market size is projected to reach 16, 556.6million by 2025, growing at a CAGR 32.8%from 2018 to 2025.
With all of this at the background and edge and cloud computing becoming more and more efficient, without much human interventions, the future of data centers in all possibilities will be human free. While the concept has been around for quite some time now, translating that into reality will mean, future data centers will be designed as complex machines rather than real estate. With that, instead of dedicated on-site staff, these facilities will warrant remote monitoring and management. These facilities will not only reduce the potential for human error but also minimize risk of injuries to new staff. To conclude, it may sound ironic, but the future appears to be rather bright for the future data centers.
