While stores have flocked to the cloud, we’ve seen a few downsides to hosting data with outside companies. With the age of IoT making us more reliant on technology than ever, it’s time to rethink how we look at computing.
That’s where the benefits of edge computing come in. Edge, referring to the physical location of your servers, literally means doing your computing nearby instead of on the cloud.
Here’s why you should keep an eye on this trend:
Edge Computing Is Faster
As Paul Miller from The Verge puts it, “If a Computer A needs to ask Computer B, half a globe away, before it can do anything, the user of Computer A perceives this delay as latency.” Instead of having to resolve your queries in the cloud, you can now handle everything in your closed system. By moving your computing closer, you eliminate the slow load times and create a more efficient system.
Edge Computing Is Safer
A major setback of cloud computing is that you’re trusting your data with an outside vendor. As Mark Chapman at the Lenovo Data Center Group explains, “Keeping the data within the store walls minimizes these concerns.” Now, security is in your hands, and you can mitigate the risk of a breach much easier. Cloud computing is also susceptible to breaks in internet connectivity. Business owners cannot afford to simply pause operations due to a lack of data access. Edge computing takes care of it by storing data in house.
Edge Computing Minimizes Bandwidth
Statista predicts that by 2025, there will be over 75 billion IoT devices installed worldwide. That’s going to demand a lot of bandwidth – and it’s room that we don’t have on the cloud. According to CloudFlare, “In order to support all those devices, significant amounts of computation will have to be moved to the edge.” The truth is, IoT devices create and store massive amounts of data. Data that are just taking up room on the cloud for no major reason. It’s smarter to move processing to the edge, freeing up the cloud, and streamlining your operations.
Work with Worldlink to Deploy Edge Computing
At Worldlink, we can help make edge computing a reality for your store. Work with our team to create a faster, safer, and more reliable network that will keep your operations on budget and working more efficiently than ever.
Contact us to learn more, or give us a call at (949) 861-2830.