We've heard a lot about edge computing in the data center industry, the challenges as well as all of its benefits.
While some IT leaders have quickly recognized the value of leveraging the edge for remote applications, many are still trying to understand the full potential of edge computing and how they can use it to improve their business processes and find greater business opportunities.
Edge is a supporter and driver of disruptive technologies– 5G, IoT, IIoT, AI and others - that can differentiate a business from its competitors. In order to promote the business value of edge technology initiatives internally, and to help their CEOs understand why and how to leverage this technology to drive and generate new business opportunities, IT leaders need to know the most promising and lucrative use cases, and how they impact customer experience, SLAs and the bottom line.
Following are some of the strongest examples of how edge, from my perspective, can bring greater business possibilities, beginning now and into the near future.
Telecommunications in Edge Offers a Great Opportunity
The isolation caused by COVID-19 augmented the consumption of online content and the rise of Internet services, causing us as consumers not only to gravitate toward online channels, but also to prefer ultra-high-speed, low-latency digital experiences.
For telecommunications service providers, edge computing has become the opportunity to meet these market demands, generate higher revenues, enjoy substantial savings, and add value to the customer experience. Edge is essential, not only to create value-added services, but also to ensure consumers may enjoy the true digital experience they seek.
Some use cases in telecom are: user experience improvement due to the low latency that edge can provide to content delivery services (streaming, AR/VR gaming and so on); friendly mobile applications development that offer better customer experiences and service; a potential cyber security diminishment for IoT devices; and 5G boosting because edge is a key technology to accelerate 5G.
“Buy online, pick up in store” Opens the Door of E-commerce to Edge
As businesses have increased their digital sales capabilities, e-commerce has become more prominent in both the B2C and B2B markets. Sectors such as retail are generating an unprecedented amount of data, and retailers need strategies and analytic tools to capitalize on the growing amounts of data.
Edge computing is becoming critical to e-commerce for three simple reasons: better leveraging of data, lower costs for analysis - rather than taking it to the cloud first - and because businesses can no longer afford to accept the inevitable latency generated by sending data over a network for processing.
Use cases include a better customer experience by providing information that can bring value to customers, higher efficiency of operational processes, in-depht knowledge of customer experience trends, better management of security and compliance to protect consumer and retailer data.
Edge Promises to Improve Health and Save More Lives
The healthcare industry faces many challenges, not only in Latin America, but globally. In response to this, the industry has been successfully implementing technologies such as IoT to better understand and predict healthcare outcomes. However, analyzing data remotely anticipates a number of drawbacks, such as bandwidth congestion, network reliability, and latency, which could negatively impact the delivery of care and overall patient health.
Thus, we will see a major shift towards IoT devices on the edge. Industry organizations are moving to edge data centers because they provide the ability to compute, process, and analyze data at the same level of quality as the cloud, but without the dreaded latency. This of course reduces costs, increases efficiency and improves the patient experience.
Some use cases in this sector are a better patient experience by smart devices access, gathering and analyzing patient health-related data that can predict and respond to health emergencies, accessing to patient's data even in areas with poor connectivity, and a better management of hospital inventories.
Edge is Essential to the Success of Industry 4.0
As manufacturing businesses seek to gain a competitive advantage, they are experiencing rapid and disruptive changes to their operations by automating their facilities with IoT, smart sensors, artificial intelligence, and robotics. This scenario generates an amount of data that can be managed and analyzed in a way that is more efficient, secure and profitable if we manage it close to its generation source.
Edge computing plays a critical role in improving this efficiency. By doing so, manufacturers will be able to collect and analyze data in real time, enabling better predictive maintenance and energy efficiency that will translate into lower business costs. If your manufacturing company is interested in implementing an edge computing system; without a doubt, the first thing you need to consider is a connectivity strategy that ensures the agile movement of data from one place to another.
Use cases in Industry 4.0 include predictive maintenance to detect upcoming failures, condition-based monitoring (CBM) of assets remotely, manufacturing as a service implementations needed to meet stringent latency requirements, precision monitoring and control of assets and processes enabling swift operational responsiveness to unforeseen events, and a must for deploying next-generation technologies such as IoT, AI and wearables.
Best Customer Service in the Financial Sector
Banks and financial institutions need to offer quality services and better user experiences to attract more customers. However, handling large volumes of data from different points of contact with customers can slow down operations or interrupt services.
Edge represents an opportunity for this sector to improve customer service, reduce costs and ensure regulatory compliance, particularly in traditional retail banking companies. And, by placing servers in data centers close to operations, an edge computing structure provides more accurate and up-to-date information in real time, which is critical to keep financial businesses in constant motion.
Some of the use cases include highly personalized customer engagement down to the individual level, through advertising of relevant financial products and services; real-time fraud detection and prevention to protect customers; data sovereignty for compliance allowing the bank’s financial health and compliance; and data analytics for real-time cybersecurity.
Edge: The Foundation of Smart Cities
Although in Latin America the development of smart cities is still emerging, Frost & Sullivan affirms that we can already observe concrete progress on the continent. A massive flow of data is the basis for the operation of these intelligent environments. Therefore, as connected devices and services grow, there will be an increasing risk of network congestion, which could affect performance.
Undoubtedly, this advancement towards smart cities will require us to adopt a decentralized data processing system at the local level, which creates the possibility of rapid and uninterrupted data analysis, providing the authorities with information in a timely and relevant manner, as well as contributing to improving the quality of life of citizens.
On smart cities, uses cases involve crimes or other disastrous events prevention or de-escalation; better management and conservation of resources including energy, water and fresh air; civic management optimization (traffic flow monitoring, parking space availability, public streetlight management); intelligent transport and autonomous intelligent vehicles enablement.
As we can see, understanding and exploring edge computing is particularly useful; first for IT leaders, who must understand and explain where the value of technology lies for their organizations; and second, for business leaders, especially when it comes to possible investments to improve business processes.
It is clear that edge computing is essential to meet business goals and the first step in benefiting from the edge and modern technologies such as 5G, AI, IoT, AR, but you need to remember that in the end, edge is a critical piece of a company’s overall digital strategy, and it needs to be protected, at scale, just like an enterprise data center.
There are many evident technical and business advantages that drive edge computing to become a keystone of business digital strategy. If properly designed, administered and protected, this enables otherwise unattainable performance, efficiency, operational costs reductions and opens opportunities for new business models.
