How should CIOs manage data at the edge?

The ubiquity of popular buzzwords or phrases in the technology community brings a certain kind of pressure. If everyone seems to be talking about the importance and transformative potential of an exciting new technology, then as a CIO it’s only natural to want to dive straight in and explore its potential use cases as soon as possible.

This is particularly true of businesses and edge computing. After all, edge implementation can deliver new experiences to the customer, help develop new products and open up new lines of revenue – why wouldn’t you want to get started as quickly as possible?

However, while no-one wants to stand in the way of transformative new technologies, CIOs have to bring clarity and common sense to the conversation – particularly on how edge implementation will affect a business’s security portfolio. The CIO must take a unified approach to data management when it comes to storage, security, and accessibility, ensuring that security is part of the conversation from the start and is given the same amount of attention from the business as all the exciting edge use cases.

Edge creates a whole new set of security challenges for CIOs, who are used to just dealing with the data centre. Under an edge setup, data is processed closer to the source, away from the centralised data centre that is more physically secure.

For CIOs, the task is to build a data management plan that will future-proof against edge expansion – allowing the business to scale up quickly while maintaining security and cost-efficiency

Because of this, it is imperative that CIOs build comprehensive security into any edge implementation proposal from the start. If security is bolted on after the business goals and ambitions of edge have been set, there will undoubtedly be trouble ahead.

The need for processing at the edge comes from the sheer amount of data generated as our connected world expands over the coming years – according to DataAge 2025, a report sponsored by Seagate and conducted by IDC, 90% of the data created in 2025 will require security protection. More data, of course, means more vulnerability – which is why security, with intelligent data storage and data-at-rest encryption at its foundation, has to be at the heart of any business’s edge computing plans. Couple this with the increased physical concerns – more locations means that there are more sites to keep secure – and it’s clear that this is a complex challenge that must be managed methodically.