As business leaders and IT decision-makers continue to make digital transformation a top priority in 2018, the Internet of Things (IoT) will become one of the biggest enterprise technology trends. But IoT deployments often require information processing and decision-making closer to the source of the data – the IoT devices themselves. Rather than incur the cost and latency of sending this information to the cloud or on-premise centralized data center, many businesses are looking to incorporate Edge computing within their infrastructures.
Edge computing is particularly useful in situations where time is critical. Take for example an industrial use case where IoT devices are being used to monitor oil and gas pipelines. Time consuming, dangerous and costly human inspection can be augmented or replaced using technology that can rapidly detect leakages or other anomalies, and automatically alert the right parties to ensure the issue is resolved. In use cases like this, decentralized, distributed computing at the edge can dramatically cut response times.
Many digital businesses today rely on the cloud for their computing needs. While this will continue to be an important part of how businesses operate, IoT initiatives will also necessitate the investment in computing solutions closer to the edge. For IoT-enabled communications where time matters and latency creates serious issues, keeping computing capabilities at the edge, near these devices, provides the lowest latency possible.
What networking technologies can enterprises deploy to improve efficiency of IoT devices? A great deal of focus is placed on IoT devices themselves, while much less thought is typically given to the network connectivity that facilitates their communication. Fast inter-device communications and edge computing architectures require a robust underlying network. And, for many IoT use cases, the public Internet and public cloud architectures are not well suited to hosting time sensitive, critical communications. IoT data that is being processed in the cloud is transported via the Internet, and while the internet may seem like an inexhaustible resource, the truth is that the internet has finite capacity, and there are many performance and security vulnerabilities within its open architecture. Considering the risks of these vulnerabilities, digital businesses should instead use private networks with edge compute capabilities that allow data being transported between IoT devices to bypass the public internet, ensuring the fastest and most secure movement of information possible.
