Imagine, you’re in a self-driving car and it stops in the middle of a crossroad when it is supposed to take a left turn. What, possibly, would have happened?
Whenever an IoT-connected device, in this case a self-driving car, has to make a decision, it sends a message through the network to the cloud and then cloud sends back an instruction through the network back to the car. A delay in this communication process can make IoT devices function slower.
In order to function smoothly, Internet of Things (IoT) devices need to communicate to the cloud in a matter of milliseconds. The delay in the process, known as latency, can risk human lives too.
The latency problem arises from the way the Internet is designed to operate and the protocols that drive it, particularly the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). The BGP helps make the Internet good at surviving outages by being able to route around any problems. But, it’s not so good at accounting for how long any given packet will take to reach its destination. That’s because all BGP cares about is the number of hops between the source and destination addresses – the route with the fewest hops wins, no matter long or congested it may be.
As a result, some traffic may suffer excessive delays, or latency. For decades, adoption of cloud has resulted in streamlining operations and minimising time to deliver services.
However, the present day environment has created a need for faster decision making and to weed out increased outages due to cloud. This is why edge computing is gaining prominence.
Edge computing has the power to reduce latency and is bringing about a tectonic change. Edge computing, which works on the principle of a more distributed network, makes sure there is no disconnect in real-time information processing and gives a more reliable network.
As per an IDC report, by 2025, nearly 80 billion devices will be connected to the internet and the amount of data being generated is doubling every two years.
In this backdrop, businesses cannot risk bad network connections due to latency in order to deliver on customer’s expectations, as they need everything ‘Now’.
So, how does one deploy edge computing? One solution is to implement a series of computers all around the Internet to cache content so it’s served up closer to the users who are consuming it.
Another option is for a multinational company to build a series of small data centres around the globe, close to where it has large concentrations of employees. It could then replicate any critical and delay-sensitive applications at those data centres, such as unified communications suites that support voice, instant messaging and video. Users connect to the data centre closest to their location and experience far better performance due to dramatically reduced latency.
One of the companies that can handhold any industry in edge computing is Schneider Electric. APC by Schneider Electric will fuel growth and provide your customers a glitch-free experience.
It can turn your server room into IoT-ready on-premise data centres. APC, which provides all components for the local edge IT Infrastructure, is also the leading brand in uninterrupted power supply (UPS). It also makes easy for customers to choose and provides them the benefit of having single window for all the needs.
All components in APC Local edge solution are IoT ready i.e. they communicate with each other and can be monitored by the user over IP from a remote location. Avail a 75%* cashback from APC by Schneider Electric to buy any IT Infrastructure product to upgrade and improve your Edge IT Infrastructure. APC local Edge solution package: APC Smart-UPSTM , NetShelter® Rack, PDUs and NetBotz (Environmental Monitoring)
It is noteworthy, IDC has estimated that by 2020, 10% of the world’s data will be processed on the Edge. Choice is yours.
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