Pairing Cloud Edge Solutions With Enterprise Needs

Edge computing is exploding in enterprise organizations. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 75% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed at the edge. Organizations need to design for the edge first if they are to keep up with the evolving demands in the market. However, this isn’t a case of edge computing versus the cloud but a uniting of the two as they become more tightly integrated.

Cloud edge computing, or fog computing, takes the flexibility and robustness of the cloud and brings it closer to users. This infrastructure setup places compute, storage, and bandwidth much closer to users to improve metrics like latency and reliability.

Often when we think of the benefits of the cloud, we think of the end users’ needs. But cloud edge solutions provide just as many benefits to the enterprise as they do for the user. Let’s look at five enterprise needs and how cloud edge solutions fill those needs.

1. Latency and bandwidth

Similar to a highway, networks are affected by traffic and distance. The farther away a user is from the source, the longer it will take to reach them and the more it will cost to get the data to the user. Cloud edge solutions place computing hardware closer to the users. This proximity benefits the enterprise by shortening load times, reducing bandwidth for any single location, and speeding up app performance.

2. Scalability

Enterprise organizations are concerned about growth. For this reason, infrastructure needs to scale economically. The challenge with centralized computing is that as a user base grows, the data center has to expand its reach, becoming inefficient over time. With the cloud edge model, enterprises can establish edge nodes that serve users from their region and only tax the cloud with necessary traffic or as a failsafe when an edge node goes down.

3. Security

Data security is paramount as more customer data is stored on networks. Failure to protect this data can have legal and brand-damaging repercussions for organizations, especially those in the financial and healthcare sectors. Cloud edge computing detects security threats at the edge, eliminating them on-site or, in more severe cases, shutting down to limit the damage. Additionally, in edge computing, data is filtered and processed locally instead of traversing the network to a centralized data center; this means less transfer of sensitive data between devices and the centralized cloud.

4. Controlling costs

Large organizations are always looking for ways to control costs as small changes add up quickly at their scale. One way organizations can control costs is by leveraging cloud edge solutions. Cloud edge computing moves data processing to the business location and only sends what’s necessary to the cloud. When considering the frequency and scale that large organizations process data, the savings quickly become apparent. Additionally, by shortening the distance data needs to travel, companies save on bandwidth and network usage fees.

5. Organizational responsiveness

Cloud edge software has the computing capacity to respond to anomalies and threats to the network. It also has a level of self-healing capabilities that help prevent systems from going down indefinitely. The ability to protect itself from extensive downtime is something that users appreciate, especially in the fast-paced environments of machine learning and AI.

Enterprise Organizations Need Flexible Solutions

Large organizations need infrastructure solutions that can flex the needs of their team and their market. Cloud edge solutions provide businesses with scalability, cost control, and responsive computing capabilities. However, organizations must also consider how they will deploy their distributed network infrastructure.

Intequus helps organizations manage cloud edge infrastructure over its entire lifecycle, from design to decommissioning your hardware. Learn more about our fully managed edge infrastructure capabilities by talking to our team. Contact us.