If the last 18 months has taught us anything , it ’ s that gone are the days where an organization could expect the bulk of its employees to work from a central office .

With the world of work now increasingly fragmented and the workforce dispersed across cities , states and time zones , an Edge Computing strategy built upon a hybrid multi-cloud architecture will be fundamental to business success .

Not only are employees increasingly working from anywhere , the on-going proliferation of IoT devices means that Edge Computing itself has evolved . Whereas in years gone by Edge Computing was primarily concerned with data collection and application delivery , it is now also ground-zero for data processing – an evolution that requires significantly higher performance and scalability .

At its core , the aim of any Edge Computing strategy is to reduce latency in situations where instantaneous application response times can improve employee productivity , safety and business performance .

Today ’ s enterprises succeed or fail based on the insights they derive from their data and the pace with which they can uncover them . As such , Edge Computing is any organization ’ s ‘ ace in the hole ’.

With IoT devices now playing a central role in industries and workplaces as diverse as oil rigs , agricultural fields , manufacturing plants , transportation and healthcare , the data these devices generate have the most value at the location it is generated – at the Edge .

Edge Computing is any organization ’ s ‘ ace in the hole ’.

If these datasets had to first be sent back to a central data center before they were cleaned , analyzed and evaluated , those insights would be obsolete – in a best-case scenario – by the time they made it back to the Edge . In a worst-case scenario , a catastrophic failure could have been avoided if those insights were immediately available where and when they were needed most .

While business critical applications and devices at the Edge provide real-time responses thanks to their location , the data they ’ re working with is part of a larger application ecosystem . The same data used to make decisions at the Edge can also improve business intelligence , AI models and much more .

According to Gartner : “ Organizations now realize that a single centralized public cloud is not a panacea . Organizations will need multiple clouds to support specific functions and distributed clouds for edge processing with hyperscaler functions .”

The ability for edge applications and workloads to run in the best fitting cloud environment according to variables such as cost , security and performance can unlock significant economic and competitive advantage .

To truly realize these benefits , however , organizations need the ability to dynamically shift workloads between these multiple clouds – whether private , public , or distributed – as requirements change .

The last , but certainly not least , element in an Edge Computing strategy is enabling the centrally-located IT team to support the environment ’ s furthest boundaries . Despite the Edge ’ s increasing importance , having dedicated IT resources at every site is unfeasible . As such , the ability for the organization ’ s most highlyskilled technical staff to support edge deployments from a central location ensures the on-going success of any Edge Computing strategy .

34 INTELLIGENTCIO APAC www . intelligentcio . com

Intelligent CIO APAC Issue 15 | Page 34

If the last 18 months has taught us anything , it ’ s that gone are the days where an organization could expect the bulk of its employees to work from a central office .