How Edge Computing can work alongside traditional data centres

30Mar

As businesses grow they soon find that their expanding computing infrastructure creates more points at risk of failure. It’s a huge issue for a growing business and one that needs immediate preventative procedures set in place before systems fail and lead to expensive damage.

These points of failure at the edge of the network are where most critical situations can occur rapidly and can often go unnoticed for unacceptably long periods – it could be as simple as unmanned machinery breaking down in a remote location that causes localised machine failure, this can lead in time to wider system failure. Whatever IT you have at the edge of your infrastructure, in many cases this part of the infrastructure has little IT resource or expert staff to dedicate time to keep an eye out and ensure everything is running as planned. The computing taking place at this point in the infrastructure is what we define as Edge Computing.

Edge Computing poses many challenges for most sectors: manufacturing; transportation; retail and telecommunication, to name but a few. Many organisation’s operational functions are carried out with consideration of their direct connection, or proximity, to the data centre but, when running applications remotely at the edge, they aren’t always able to utilise the full computing power, or human resource, offered by the data centre. Compromises often have to be made which lead to questions over data integrity and security and, while these are key factors that are driving the increase in demand for Edge Computing, effectively pushing the analysis and reporting out to more remote locations it means that less data has to travel the network, allowing instant reporting and alerting from the edge itself.

Read the full article in the April issue of PBSI