WHAT'S DRIVING EDGE COMPUTING?

According to global market insights, the edge data centre market is projected to hit $13 billion USD by 2024. Capital is already deployed in edge data centre 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 benefits of edge computing? 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. 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 centre 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 analysed.

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.