How Do You Redefine Your Edge?
So much has changed in recent times with how we work and interact with one another. This blog is the fourth installment in Insight’s Be Ambitious series, exploring the unique ways companies can forge into the unknowns of an ever-evolving future by embracing bold changes through technology.
We are at an inflection point when it comes to accelerating edge computing — a concept that most often refers to technology in distributed environments where users don’t have to monitor it in person. But in reality, the intelligent edge is being redefined by anywhere work environments that are now more dispersed than ever.
Today, the edge is at the branch, the home office, within the cloud and anywhere that our employees and devices access our applications and data. Conversations on the exponential growth of the edge have been well underway for years, surrounding its impact on wireless IoT devices and keeping data secure and accessible. In fact, 73.1 zettabytes of data are expected to be generated by IoT devices by 2025 vs. 18.3 zettabytes in 2019.
In other words, there are no limits to the demands on the edge.
This begs the question many are grappling with: How do you define “your” edge? Ultimately, there is no clear answer because the edge can be different depending on what your business does, the environment it operates in, and which devices are being leveraged in a given enterprise. It all comes down to ensuring connectivity can be applied to anyone, anywhere, at any time.
Redefining Edge Connectivity
The edge evolution has been gaining traction for quite some time. Reflecting on the computing landscape in the 1970s, which was all about the mainframe, our frameworks were highly concentrated and designated to peer-to-peer interactions. In the decades to come — from the 1980s through the early 2000s — the edge began to shift as our society embraced new, innovative technologies like the internet boom and the upsurge in uses of PCs in organizations. This meant that our approach to technology needed to change along with how we access information.
Fast forward to the 2010s when the proliferation of mobile devices meant that nearly everyone now had a connected computer in their pocket. Because of this, tens of billions of devices became sources collecting a variety of data sets in real time.
Our methods to communicate amongst each other soon demanded more mature and complex communication meshes, and today this requires us to approach supporting technology in a different way than we did in the early days of the computer and the internet decades ago. In other words, supporting the modern edge needs a modernized approach.
Breaking Out of the Traditional, Legacy Architectures
The modern edge remains integral for unique business outcomes and organizations looking to deliver on meaningful transformation. While our traditional network and security architectures are framed around a highly defined edge (e.g., office branches laddering up to centralized corporate data centers), it is increasingly clear that there are inefficiencies associated with these legacy models and hyper-controlled environments, including compromised agility, security and flexibility.
In contrast to traditional models, the intelligent edge can now be anywhere we can access our workloads and data to connect and communicate in a seamless fashion. IoT devices and communication requirements are diverse. What’s best for monitoring solutions in medical centers (5G and private LTE) might differ from home-use smart tech (lower power and bandwidth needs).
This is why it is critical to define the right edge networking architecture for your organization that connects people, processes and information in the most meaningful ways. This requires:
· Identifying network requirements based on compute, availability, security needs and the number of devices.
· Building and operationalizing core-to-edge network solutions — including switching, wireless infrastructure and gateways/firewalls — often in partnership with leading network technology providers that have a deeper well of knowledge and resources.
· Maintaining edge network technologies with strategic support for streamlined management, cost savings, security and performance.
Driving Business Innovation from the Edge
Anywhere operations require secure, seamless connectivity and communication — and that’s where the intelligent edge comes into play. From a manufacturing standpoint, we have seen these solutions in action through our work with a large U.S. beverage bottler that was experiencing difficulty ensuring its robotic forklift was automated. They were consequently impacted in how they recognized revenue.
In order to rectify these issues and ensure the company could ship more of its product — and ship it faster to boost revenue — it was necessary to deploy management and automation tools, leverage the cloud and update security mechanisms.
Ultimately, because of modern, edge architectures, the company improved its ability to expand rapidly and efficiently to new locations, decrease autonomous forklift faults by 95% — leading to greater productivity — and enhance its security mechanisms for wired and wireless networks.
Within the healthcare industry, one of our clients is a Northern California medical network running not-for-profit hospitals. They needed to refresh a legacy network and security infrastructure. While thinking about the context of their environment, a sector in which the overall number of attempted cyber-attacks has increased exponentially, we knew that this organization needed its infrastructure to be more nimble, agile and secure.
By leveraging assets from Cisco and Palo Alto Networks, we were able to help this client bring mature, overall solutions to the table and uplift its security profile. This has led to tangible returns on investment for the business and the customers they serve, including an ability to more rapidly adapt and deploy lifesaving assets.
While most of the industry technologies for which we implement edge solutions are not new to market, they have evolved in a way that is in accordance with the digital direction businesses are rapidly accelerating toward. There has been substantial transformation across key verticals in recent years, including:
· Agricultural (e.g., smart farming, remote monitoring for waste reduction and sustainability)
· Manufacturing (e.g., factory networks, plant efficiency, asset monitoring)
· Utilities (e.g., remote asset management, automation, sub-stations)
· Healthcare (e.g., medical asset tracking, temperature tracking, patient monitoring, wayfinding)
· Transportation (e.g., roadways and intersections, rail, mass transit, airports)
· Connected cities (e.g., smart lighting, waste management, safety security, public connectivity)
Approaching the Modern Edge Conversation
Because business transformation is driving technological innovation — and vice versa — foundational technology must modernize along with it to provide adequate support. Applications and use cases surrounding the edge are exciting (think augmented and virtual reality or automation, for instance) and require prioritizing the following:
· Access: This is the foundation of management and automation as it pertains to the edge, facilitating fast, agile deployments, better speed performances, and is underpinned by wired, wireless, and IoT devices. Edge connectivity is built for any type of environment, ensuring flexible access and availability for services anytime, anywhere.
· Optimizing Connectivity: When thinking about technologies like SD-WAN and SASE, organizations should consider how they can provide edge connectivity to a variety of different data centers and ensure there is a dynamic flow of information.
· Pervasive Security: Security should not be viewed as an impediment to getting work done. Instead, things like network access control, next-gen firewalls and threat detection help ensure we have a healthy environment to conduct business and can mitigate impact if an area is compromised.
The need for the intelligent edge is now, but only if enterprises capitalize on the technology in place to build upon their strong business foundation and prepare themselves for greater agility and scalability to take on future innovation.
Insight Enterprises is a Fortune 500 solutions integrator helping organizations accelerate their digital journey to modernize their business and maximize the value of technology. Insight’s technical expertise spans cloud and edge-based transformation solutions, with global scale and optimization built on 33+ years of deep partnerships with the world’s leading and emerging technology providers.
