“Firms should start their edge journey”: Forrester

Organisations should begin looking to kick off an edge computing journey and begin identifying use cases according to the latest from Forrester.   

In its The State Of Edge Computing, 2024 report the finding shows 77 percent of global enterprise telecom decision-makers are already adopting edge networking infrastructure.

Findings show financial services, insurance and high-tech manufacturing firms are leading adopters with 86 percent of respondents adopting edge networking infrastructure. 

Forrester Principal Analyst Michele Pelino said, “Firms should start their edge journey by identifying critical edge use cases relevant to their organisation including such industry-specific scenarios as ecommerce in retail, predictive maintenance in manufacturing, and wearable devices in healthcare.”

“In addition, every new network connection, smart device, edge server, or micro data centre is an attack surface for hackers, so it is critical to address network, application, and device security issues up front.”

Pelino told Digital Nation that technology executives across all regions, including the APAC regions “must be knowledgeable about major classes of edge computing technologies in their organisation, as well as the key opportunities to deploy edge solutions.”

“Edge computing technologies help firms in a range of verticals anticipate customer needs, act on their behalf, and operate their businesses efficiently, often in localised, IoT contexts. 

“Edge computing puts compute, storage, and intelligence close to where it’s needed, allowing firms to design and deploy software flexibly between central, distributed, and local sites. 

“The edge computing decisions made by enterprise stakeholders affect infrastructure, operations, security, partnerships, and innovation in the organisation,” Pelino said. 

Pelino added edge computing “brings data, analytics processing, and storage closer to the equipment to monitor machine health in real-time.”

“Other relevant edge use cases in manufacturing include optimising robotics, drones, or autonomous guided vehicles to complete key industrial operations functions.”

In retail, edge sensors, cameras and AI-powered video analytics create smart shelves that monitor and optimise stock and shelf capacity in real time; and transform point-of-sale systems to engage customers.

This reduces inventory loss; or provides personalised wayfinding for customers to reduce waiting times, according to Pelino. 

Despite benefits for Australian businesses, Pelino said challenges of edge computing include security risks given the “diverse array of edge devices, use cases, and environments”. 

“This concern is exacerbated by the fact that attackers can gain access to edge environments via standard application flaws, network misconfigurations, insecure protocols, or physical access to the device itself. 

“Every new network connection, smart device, edge server, or micro data centre is an attack surface for hackers.”

Pelino explained the “optimal” way to tackle this is to implement a “zero trust edge architecture to bring networking and security together, starting on-premises with SD-WAN, firewalls and zero trust network access and ending with routing, secure web gateways, and cloud security gateways in the cloud.”