The future of enterprise tech won't be confined to the data center mothership -- nor even the public cloud. Wedded to the internet of things, edge computing puts processing horsepower wherever it needs to go.
Like other hot new areas of enterprise tech, edge computing is a broad architectural concept rather than a specific set of solutions. Primarily, edge computing is applied to low-latency situations where compute power must be close to the action, whether that activity is industrial IoT robots flinging widgets or sensors continuously taking the temperature of vaccines in production. The research firm Frost & Sullivan predicts that by 2022, 90 percent of industrial enterprises will employ edge computing.
Edge computing is a form of distributed computing that extends beyond the data center mothership. When you think about it, how else should enterprises invest in the future? Yes, we know that a big chunk of that investment will go to the big public cloud providers – but hardware and software that enterprises own and operate isn’t going away. So why not physically distribute it where the business needs it most?
By Eric Knorr on Network World