Over the past few years, organizations of all sizes have been moving applications to the cloud. This move, for the most part, has been both financially and operationally efficient. However, there are rising concerns that not everything can or should move to the cloud or remote data centers. As more and more devices connect to the internet and processes and factory lines become automated, having data travel back-and-forth to the cloud or a remote data center for processing will become increasingly inefficient and untenable.
The primary concern revolves around latency. For example, an AI-driven automated process won’t work effectively if machine responses are delayed by the processing time required to transmit data and receive results from the cloud or remote data center. The second concern is that some applications run the risk of producing so much data that passing all the data to the cloud will become costly and inefficient. These concerns have given rise to edge computing.