What is Edge Computing Accenture?

Cloud emerged and most of the data is moved to the cloud, this is where edge computing was required. When we want to process all the data from Cloud, it becomes challenging to get insight or to get the information quickly, due to latency and bandwidth issues.

What is Edge Computing?

When the data gets processed either in the cloud or on a centralized data center, the processing of data at the end user becomes challenging as it takes time to respond to the queries to the data, especially the static data, this is where edge computing works.

Edge computing helps the data processing at the nearest location to the end-user or data-consuming node. Take an example of Netflix, if you want to watch a video that is static once uploaded to the Netflix server, then Netflix distributes it to an edge network to process it faster.

Edge Computing and Cache

To optimize the performance of the most frequent queries of data especially digital resources which are static in nature, like videos, images, static text, and other files or downloadable applications, it is a good idea to use edge computing to keep the copy of this static data where users will be able to get access to this data without any latency issue as the response to end-user will be provided from the nearest server available. This is similar to the Cache that is being used by various websites today to improve their speed.

Cloud Computing and Edge Computing

Cloud computing evolved and it became important for the data owners to process the data without compromising the performance. When the data is moved to the cloud, you might have good storage and processing power at the cloud but poor network bandwidth and latency. This is how edge computing helps to improve the performance by helping to process the data from the nearest available replica of the data.

Edge Computing and 5G

5G has improved the bandwidth where users can now download and access much more data than they used to get previusly. But still, the latency issues will remain there, this is where more and more edge computing will be needed when 5G technology will grow.

Edge Computing and IoT

Everything IoT or the internet of things is producing a huge amount of data, be it connected cars, sensors, industrial IoT, home automation, smartwatches, health bands, smart meters, smart homes, sensors around us, IoTs for agriculture, weather stations, etc. For sure we need Cloud or data center to store the big data generated by all these IoTs. But these IoTs also need to process the data like sensor data and so on, however, IoT are mostly not equipped with enough data storage, but Edge Computing helps here, edge computing will process the data for these IoTs sometimes on the same Network (WAN or LAN)

Edge Computing Technology

Edge Computing Technology is not hard to understand. What is Edge Computing Technology? Edge Computing is used for Data Cacheing, Buffering, Optimization, Realtime Data Processing, Basic Analytics, and Machine to machine data convergence.

Below image will help you to understand it clearly.

Edge Computing Devices

Various cloud vendors have worked hard to solve the challenges faced by individuals and businesses, they have provided various edge computing devices to solve the challenge described above. Some of the Edge computing devices are below;

• AWS Greengrass: to build, deploy and manage software at the edge.
• Cisco Catalyst IR8100
• Dell PowerEdge XR11 and XR12
• Dell PowerStore 500
• Eaton 5P UPS
• HPE Edgeline EL8000
• Lenovo ThinkEdge SE30 And ThinkEdge SE50
• Microsoft Azure Pro R
• Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN
• Schneider Electric’s APC Smart-UPS Ultra

Cloud Strategy and Edge Computing

Cloud and edge computing are two different technologies, but we have to see them together from a data perspective. The hybrid cloud or multi-cloud strategy of your organization will definitely need edge computing consideration. Data optimization is key for any cloud technology and it is not possible today without edge computing.

When you have decided to move your services to the cloud, make sure cloud service providers understand the Edge Computing concept and are equipped to provide you with edge computing for your specific needs.

Want to know more about SD-WAN? Here is a Comprehensive SD-WAN Comparison Guide