Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, you know that you can’t swing a dead cat nowadays without hitting someone talking about the “edge.” One could make a serious argument the edge has supplanted the cloud as the IT topic that everyone talks about but doesn’t agree on a shared definition. Of course, these definitional arguments can go on for years, but the bigger question in search of an answer is “What’s driving everyone to the edge?”
From an enduser perspective, the demands for faster data processing and delivery of content and services to mobile devices will be unceasing. The projections are literally at a steeper angle than the growth of our national debt. According to Ericsson, there will be 6.1 billion smartphone users by 20201 a figure not wholly unexpected based on their current degree of ubiquity, the fact that 10.2 million units of “smart clothing” will ship in that same period, however, probably isn’t on anybody’s radar2. We’ll also be able to track pretty much anything in the coming years as current estimates say that there will be over 55 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices and over 250 million vehicles will be connected to the internet3 by 2025 per Gartner. All of that would be well and good if the current structure of the internet and cloud and mobile networks were able to keep pace. But they can’t. Not even close.