Spotlight on digital transformation at the edge
The pandemic turned the world of technology infrastructure on its head – hastening the need to support remote workers, and driving an overhaul of enterprise architecture that saw companies embracing hybrid cloud architectures overnight.
This drove a focus on edge computing – the redistribution of data collection processing away from the network core, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and other techniques to tap distributed computing power that will rebuild networks as connected affiliations of semi-autonomous data environments.
In this world, monolithic data centres are being broken down, with enterprise architectures reimagined as a collection of predominantly cloud-based services interacting with edge computing systems that put analytical power close to the place where data is being collected.
This expansion of edge computing promises new capabilities around industrial applications, bypassing the limitations of wide-area connectivity to enable self-monitoring, self-healing systems that can be rapidly packaged and delivered wherever new edge capacity is required.
In this spotlight, sponsored by Schneider Electric, iTnews explores some of the issues raised by this shift. We look at approaches to edge computing infrastructure that can help businesses reinvent themselves for the distributed future, while maintaining central control over issues such as security and data management.
The edge is the future, in whatever form that makes sense for your organisation – and it’s well past time you developed plans to harness this important step in computing architectures. Read on for some ideas about what edge promises, how to secure it, and how it can enable completely new operational methods that will change the way you build and operate enterprise systems forever.
