“The edge will eat the cloud. And this is perhaps as important as the Cloud computing trend ever was.” — Tom Bittman, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner Research
If you’re one of the many IT pros still finding your footing with Cloud computing, this statement from Tom Bittman might sting a little. It sounds like you might be spending time worrying about the cloud for nothing.
But don’t worry—the time and money you’re investing in the cloud won’t go to waste. In fact, to think the rise of edge computing spells the end of cloud computing would be a mistake.
Even if you haven’t quite perfected cloud computing, you have to keep your eye on edge computing. At the very least, it’s time to understand why edge computing is gaining ground and what it is in the first place.
Let’s be honest — cloud computing isn’t perfect. However, it provides many benefits that today’s agile businesses can’t ignore. Cloud computing vendors are helping IT teams achieve mass centralization, greater self-service, full automation of data processing, and economies of scale.
And yet, end-user experience challenges still exist. The problem is that for all of cloud computing’s benefits, universal centralization isn’t always best. Cloud computing vendors have made great strides in real-time data access, but latency still exists.
When you’re waiting for data to travel many miles from a cloud data center to the end-user, you can’t avoid latency completely. You can minimize the damage with local processing where appropriate, but that’s more of a Band-Aid approach than a true solution. With businesses launching more and more remote locations, latency and distance become ever more important.
The latency problem will only get worse as the second wave of digital transformation hits. Augmented and virtual reality, the Internet of Things, and Artificial Intelligence are coming.
