Zenlayer is growing its edge cloud and networking services

By Amit Singh, Managing Director – India, Zenlayer

Edge computing is how computing, processing, and storing will happen in the future. This technology is still in its infancy, but Gartner estimates that roughly 10% of enterprise data is getting generated and processed “at the edge” in 2018. By 2025, this would rise to a whopping 75%.

The desire to bring data closer to the Edge is one of the driving causes of the rapid rise of edge computing. The worldwide edge computing market has grown due to the increased adoption of the Internet of things (IoT) in various areas. The creation and availability of customised apps and applications fuelled the growth of edge computing. As edge computing became popular, different cloud vendors began developing and delivering Edge computing-specific software and apps, including Amazon, Microsoft, and others. The emergence of the Edge artificial intelligence has been spurred by the number of connected devices worldwide. This emergence is one of the main drivers of the edge computing industry’s growth. The Asia Pacific area would develop the fastest, thanks to rising consumer disposable income and increased use of Edge computing-based products like electric vehicles, fitness trackers, and smart home appliances.

One of the critical factors for North America’s industry dominance is Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices. The gaming sector in North America is one of the essential drivers of the country’s edge computing market share. In the smart city market, the European market has the highest percentage. It is one of the elements fuelling the expansion of edge computing in this region. By 2023, the market would be worth USD 1.94 billion, growing at a 29.3% CAGR. By 2025, the area will have 214 million 5G connections. One of the driving causes behind the growth of edge computing in Europe is the European eCommerce sector. Ecommerce revenue was over $393.8 billion in 2020 and would climb to $510.5 billion in 2024.

Several Indian corporations expressed interest in investing in data centers in India in 2019, as the country underwent a digital transition. Enterprises, telecommunications companies, and cloud service providers will invest more in edge data centres in the coming years. It would speed up applications such as streaming video, factory automation, and telemedicine, as well as emerging technology like self-driving cars and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR).

Following a tripling of data centre capacity by 2025, India’s data centre business would create a US$4.9 billion investment opportunity. Fuelled by the pandemic outbreak, the Indian data centre market by investment would grow by a CAGR of over 12% from 2020 to 2026. The demand from many businesses, including BFSI, e-commerce, and government organisations, has resulted in significant investment from service providers. Between 2020 and 2025, IaaS would expand at a CAGR of 20%.

In specific ways, e-commerce and substantial retail chains have already adopted a hybrid architecture that includes the cloud, regional Data Centers, and edge Data Centers. Here’s an example of a famous situation involving Tanishq, a Titan Company subsidiary with a central Data Centre. They had significant merchandise and wanted to improve their surveillance with CCTV cameras. The bandwidth necessary if they had to record 12 hours of footage and upload it to the central Data Centre for analytics would have been enormous. And that’s for just one store. The enterprise will be doomed if you multiply it by the 150 stores they own. Instead, they installed edge servers in the showrooms. It would now record video and run analytics locally, only sending exceptions to the central server for further analysis, reducing the bandwidth and compute power required at the primary Data Centre, which would otherwise have to process video from all 150 stores.

Data Centers are proven to be a game-changer in the pharmaceutical business. Pharma firms generate a massive amount of data, which they must store, access, and open up for validation by their researchers and regulatory agencies over long periods ranging from 10 to 20 years, according to the nature of the sector and legal obligations. A hub-and-spoke approach with local servers connected to a Central Data Centre comes to the rescue.

Edge computing is still evolving, and we are researching new technologies and approaches to improve its capabilities and performance. Edge availability is perhaps the most notable trend, with edge services predicted to be available worldwide by 2028. Whereas today’s edge computing is frequently situation-specific, the technology would become more pervasive and change the way people use the Internet, bringing more abstraction and potential use cases.

Edge computing comes with its own set of issues. For starters, high-processing-capacity edge computing devices are expensive. Configuration, installation, and maintenance of an edge computing platform are costly endeavours for a company. Second, with the increase of susceptible edge nodes and IoT devices, computer architecture is exposed to cyberattacks. Most of these gadgets don’t require third-party API authentication for simplicity of usage. As a result, these gadgets are vulnerable to hacking, espionage, detrimental interference, and identity theft. Finally, an intelligent performance monitoring platform to monitor the challenges faced by edge application devices is still getting developed. Edge computing’s reliability is still in doubt without an edge monitoring network.

Wireless communication technologies such as 5G and Wi-Fi 6 will impact edge deployments and usage in the coming years. AWS and Verizon, for example, have collaborated to boost connectivity at the Edge. It would enable virtualization and automation capabilities such as better vehicle autonomy and workload migrations to the Edge and make wireless networks more flexible and cost-effective.

Zenlayer is assisting in bringing the cloud to the customer, ensuring that it is a low latency, high performance, secure, and cost-effective offering suitable to the customer’s specific local requirements. The benefits of an integrated hybrid, multi-cloud solution provided locally to the Edge can have a real influence on the operations of healthcare providers, cloud gaming firms, financial institutions, manufacturers or retailers, or any other organisation.

Companies can extend their network services into places previously out of reach of traditional architecture once a framework is in place. Edge data centres will play a massive role in the technological landscape of Digital transformation in the future, thanks to the rise of 5G data, the growing population, and enhanced facilities. It would be prudent to keep an eye on the coming years so that we have practical solutions for industrial and commercial edge data centre applications. The Edge Data Centre will become a lifeline and a critical revenue generator for telcos, cloud, IoT, CDN, and content providers.