For a lot of the biggest trends in technology, edge computing is going to be a necessity.

Today, the public cloud is unrivaled in its ability to store and compute data. But getting the data there and back is still limited by the speed of the internet. With edge computing, data is not sent to the cloud but acted on at the source, creating faster real-time insights.

More data is being created in more locations than ever before. From oil rigs, to cars, to factories, there is a growing need for real-time data processing. Edge Computing can provide a solution to satisfy all these needs.

So, by putting edge devices on no matter if it is a cellphone tower or an autonomous vehicle that we have today, we are now able to do things that were impossible to do before. Most of it, just because the cost of sending the data, processing all of it and retrieving the feedback was too much and sometimes the latency, wouldn’t enable the technology to take off.

There are lot of use cases for edge computing. Some of them are starting to be in use today.

For example, in autonomous driving. Even on a car that you buy today, there are sensors all over that can tell you when you are backing up, when you are close to something. But if you take a step further and you think about autonomous world, you are going to have a lot more of these sensors in the car.

But the sensors to provide the value that they need to, you really need to have a device that can process the information that is coming in real-time. So, if you were in a snowstorm, in your autonomous vehicle and all of a sudden, you couldn’t get that internet connection, it becomes a potentially dangerous situation.

So, having built in an edge device in to your autonomous vehicle will help make sure the vehicle is getting the updates that it needs.

In factories today, we are starting to see people use these types of edge devices where it can help predict if a device or a machine is going to start to see failure. It can start to see anomalies in how the work is getting done or how a piece of an apparel is getting made.

Jet engines do this as well. They are examples of where you can use these types of sensors where you need to gather the feedback and monitor the feedback that you are getting. But you can get those data points to figure out something that we need to check before a problem ever arises.

Edge computing has a pivotal role in the future and it is not a question of if, but when?

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