EdgeConneX® has released key findings from its “2016: The Year of the Edge” webinar, held Tuesday, January 12, 2016. Led by EdgeConneX chief commercial officer Clint Heiden, the webinar examined the emerging importance of edge infrastructure and the role it plays in the sustainability of the Internet, leaving attendees with a clear message: “adopt the edge or prepare to be disrupted.”

Representatives from every major analyst firm attended the exclusive presentation, which featured Noam Freedman, SVP of Networks and chief network architect, Akamai; Guy McCormick, SVP of Engineering, Cox Communications; Don MacNeil, CTO, EdgeConneX; and Peter Neill, SVP, Global Product Strategy, EdgeConneX. The webinar focused on the dramatic push towards the edge from the cloud, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), social media, real-time interactive gaming, large enterprises, and the healthcare and financial services sectors. Citing insights from the recently announced Conviva and SamKnows white papers, there were clear conclusions drawn by the webinar participants related to adopting an Edge Strategy that includes content localization via Edge Data Centers. Participants summarized the service delivery improvements, costs savings and enhanced security that directly correlated to the adoption of localized infrastructure at the edge.

“Researchers predict over 8 billion people and 75 billion connected things on our networks by 2020,” EdgeConneX CCO, Clint Heiden, explained during the webinar. “However, enabling this scale of connectivity depends largely on the capability of infrastructure and its ability to keep pace. The core as we know it is dead. The Edge, however, grows every time an enterprise, user or device accesses the Internet. Edge infrastructure is absolutely essential in order to sustain the world’s expectation of fast and resilient access to any content, anywhere and on any device,” Heiden added.

The latest EdgeConneX white paper, published in conjunction with leading independent performance measurement firm SamKnows, uses data from the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Measuring Broadband America (MBA) program. The data determined that ISPs establishing connectivity with a content provider at an EdgeConneX Edge Data Center® (EDC) could improve performance up to 65% based on reduced latency, shorter and more reliable network paths and more secure data delivery.

Other statistics from independent third-party measurement sources discussed during the webinar include:

  • Every company will be valued based on an online relationship within five years.
  • In 10 years, 40% of Fortune 500 companies will cease to exist.
  • In a single second, there is 22,574 GB of data created on the Internet.
  • Globally, IP video will represent 80% of all traffic by 2019.
  • According to Akamai, deep deployments at the edge of end-user networks reduce costs for network operators, improve performance and scalability and minimize “unprotected” paths.
  • Amazon estimates that a 100 millisecond increase in load time can decrease sales by 1%.
  • According to Gartner, through 2015, at least 50% of cloud deployments suffered from business-impacting performance issues, requiring extensive network redesign to address them
  • Conviva® studies of web page load times show significant performance improvements (9-15%, or 150 milliseconds) in two EdgeConneX markets across two unique content providers.

To view the webinar recording, please click here.