Despite the heavy adoption of cloud services, chief information officers are finding that data-intensive applications in areas like the internet of things, artificial intelligence, automation, augmented reality and virtual reality are not always a fit for centralized cloud models.
Edge computing is a distributed model in which computing activities are performed outside of a centralized data center. IDC anticipates worldwide spending on edge computing to hit $176 billion in 2022, a 14.8% increase over 20211. The largest investments cut across a variety of use cases, including manufacturing operations, production asset management, smart grids, omnichannel operations, freight monitoring, and public safety and emergency response applications.
Edge deployments complement cloud architectures by tackling latency issues associated with running compute-intensive applications in the cloud. The volume of data required for real-time insights also makes it cost-prohibitive to migrate and store everything on a centralized cloud platform. In one IDC survey273% of executives called edge computing a strategic investment and three-quarters of those respondents said they expect less than 5 millisecond latency3 for key applications — a benchmark not feasible with centralized or cloud computing models.