Edge – the next frontier

One of the most widely anticipated trends in IT and infrastructure is significant new demand for edge computing, fueled by technologies such as 5G, IoT and AI. To date, net new demand for edge computing — processing, storing and integrating data close to where it is generated — has built slowly. As a result, some suppliers of micro data center and edge technologies have had to lower their investors’ expectations.

This slow build-out, however, does not mean that it will not happen. Demand for decentralized IT will certainly grow. There will be more workloads that need low latency, such as healthcare tech, high performance computing (notably more AI), critical IoT, and virtual and augmented reality, as well as more traffic from latency-sensitive internet companies (as Amazon famously said 10 years ago, every 100 milliseconds of latency costs them one percent in sales). There will also be more data generated by users and “things” at the edge, which will be too expensive to transport across long distances to large, centralized data centers (the “core”).