Buyer’s Guide to Edge Infrastructure Management Solutions

By 2024, organizations are expected to spend $650 billion per year on digital transformation with a CAGR of 18%. As of 2019 52% of global organizations utilized big data analytics[1]. Data is crucial for organizations to make good decisions and remain competitive. Edge computing allows organizations to take advantage of cloud systems and yet unlock the full potential of local data.

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing utilizes the internet to give organizations access to data storage, networks, software, computing power, analytics, etc. Instead of organizations needing to invest large sums of money to build the infrastructure required for these purposes on-premise, organizations can use the infrastructure of cloud service providers. This reduces the cost of purchasing and maintaining expensive hardware, reduces the time required to build complex infrastructure, and allows businesses to increase or decrease the resources they use based on their requirements. They pay for the resources they use. This enables economy of scale.

See also: Why Cloud Computing is Requiring us to Rethink Resiliency at the Edge

Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services are the two biggest cloud service providers in the world today. When these companies first started out they built their data centers in far-flung rural areas. This was done to keep their operational costs low. However, it created the problem of latency, because the organizations and clients using their services were located in urban areas and cities. Initially, this was not a big hindrance because people had limited expectations of what they wanted cloud services to do. However as cloud adoption has increased, businesses have started running critical applications and software on cloud serves. In such instances they expect the cloud to run these applications as well as they would run on-premise, thus latency is a big challenge. This is where edge computing comes in.

How Edge computing complements cloud technology

Edge computing allows organizations to tap cloud infrastructure while also getting the benefit of local data processing. Cloud service providers have started to open regional and co-location facilities to reduce the issue of latency with cloud infrastructure. In this way, a version of the client application or software can be run locally or at the regional data center, while other versions and data storage are kept at larger remote data centers. Thus tasks, where the latency needs to be low, can be run closer to the client at the network edge, while tasks that are not so immediate can be run at the larger data centers. An increasing number of businesses are investing in edge computing to improve overall performance, while still embracing the benefits of the cloud.

This white paper by Schneider Electric provides information on how organizations should go about evaluating and selecting an edge management solution. It covers the following topics:

1. Recognizing why edge infrastructure management is critical to success
2. Evaluating your business's requirements
3. Mapping business requirements with solutions
4. Assembling a team of experts
5. Choosing the right components for the solution
6. Building a business case for edge deployment
7. Creating an action plan for edge deployment

Download this resource to learn more about edge computing and its importance for your organization's future success. Subscribe to Whitepapers.online.

Sources:

1. Oct. 2020, S. Liu, " Big data - Statistics & Facts", Statista, [available online] available from: https://www.statista.com/topics/1464/big-data/ [accessed June 2021]