What’s driving the demand for edge computing?

According to Global Market Insights, the edge data center market is projected to hit USD 13 billion by 2024. Capital is already deployed in edge data center infrastructure across almost every sector such as retail, healthcare, finance, etc., where there is a need for more compute, networking, and storage close to the end user.

So the big question is what’s driving the demand and what are the befits of edge computing? Well, no one likes waiting in line (only the English have a reputation for enjoying being in a queue), and as a species we are becoming increasingly impatient of latency. The speed of today’s business demands fast and seamless access to critical data and analysis. Too many important business and consumer decisions are dependent on a real-time flow of information.

The current e-commerce economy doesn’t wait for anyone. We want to be constantly connected and experience instant gratification. According to Google, if a mobile website doesn’t load within 3 seconds, 53% of visitors will abandon it. If a transaction doesn’t happen in milliseconds, no money changes hands and vendors risk losing customers to their competition.

Not surprisingly, the demand for the services that rely on edge data centers is exploding. Think about near-field communication and mobile money app efficiency at venues such as stadiums. The faster a fan can purchase a beer, the quicker they can get back to watching the game – meaning more concessions sales revenue and a better fan experience. These types of high-speed transactions demand edge computing. Edge computing is also vital for media and content consumption user experiences. For example, video streaming is considered a vital service for young adults and applications in retail such as a smart mirror AR in fashion and VR are important in the experience economy.

Beyond e-commerce and human communications, autonomous vehicles are the most highly visible and among the most often cited examples of a new technology which will rely on high performance edge computing technology. It’s no secret that safety and accident prevention is a vital priority in this space. Transporting this critical real-time data from the car to the edge to a regional data center to the cloud and back to the vehicle to initiate an action is not feasible. Rather, this application will drive an explosion in edge infrastructure demand where large amounts of data can be cached, processed, and analyzed.

Machine learning is also seen as integral to any autonomous transport system. Data intensive, low latency applications that require real-time analytics will be the fastest growing, most storage intensive, network hungry, and compute heavy workloads to roll out in the next five years.

AI and edge computing have the power to provide great benefits in 2019 and beyond. AI will live at the edge with many infrastructure management implications in terms of costs, performance, and response times. This is separate from the heavy lifting for AI model training at scale that will be done in centralized cloud data centers. As for edge data centers, always on monitoring will track unusual activity with AI learning how systems behave which in turn will drive predictive analytics and proactive, condition-based maintenance. Learning at the machine level will simplify management, freeing up time and resources for value-added activities both professionally and personally.

To find out more about Edge Data Centres, get in touch with Source UPS today!

Call: 01252 692559 or email: info@sourceups.co.uk