Navinn Kapur, an enthusiast and a visionary business leader, is the Co-Founder & Director of Scientia Solutions Pvt Ltd. a software company. Navinn holds a rich experience of over a decade in leadership roles, managing and steering the companies to grow. He is a Chartered Accountant by profession, with 28+ years of experience in implementing successful business strategies and motivating highly galvanized teams to produce significant shareholders values. He possesses a distinguished background in building and creating organizations in India and Asia while managing strategic partnerships and customer relationships. Navinn is a gifted communicator with passion and drives to achieve success.
The competitive digital era is driving businesses and enterprises to be more agile and responsive in a fast-changing world. As a result, the uptake of internet-connected devices has continued to grow at an exponential rate. A GSMA study predicts that the global Internet of Things (IoT) market will be worth $1.1 trillion in revenue by 2025 and the average chief information officer will be responsible for more than three times the number of endpoints they managed in 2018. This means that we will also need a substantial infrastructure to scale up and manage such a network capacity. This is where edge computing enters and takes centre stage.
What is Edge Computing?
Being one of the core components of the industrial internet of things, edge computing is expected to play a major role in accelerating the journey towards industry 4.0. For the uninitiated, edge computing is the practice of moving computing power physically closer to where data is generated, usually an Internet of Things device or sensor. The benefit of this is that it allows for faster data processing, and increased bandwidth and ensures data security. By processing data close to the network, edge computing reduces the need for large amounts of data to travel among servers, the cloud, and devices or edge locations to get processed.
Benefits of Edge Computing
Let’s further understand the benefits of edge computing with the example of the upcoming 5G rollout, for which the Indian government PSU RailTel is set to establish 102 edge data centres in tier- 2 and tier-3 towns. As you can understand by the name, these are data centres located close to the network facilities and are set up for delivering cloud computing resources and cached content to the end-users. By establishing them in close proximity to the network, they allow for faster performance and lower latency by eliminating the need to move the data from distant data centres in order to process it. This eventually gives end users a faster, stable, and more responsive network and allows 5G telecom providers to offer a better customer experience.
With an ever-changing IT infrastructure and the need for high-speed data processing, edge computing is slowly supplementing and, in some cases, entirely replacing cloud and enterprise data centres. Healthcare, IoT, user experience, cybersecurity and workplace safety are a few areas where the use of edge computing is rising exponentially. IoT devices within edge computing deployments are being increasingly leveraged in the healthcare industry to help track evolving data sets and monitor facilities remotely. Even in the customer experience realm, businesses are leveraging the power of edge to deliver better services to their customers. Some SaaS companies are also making use of edge computing to offer unique solutions like end-to-end contact management & networking services among others.
Outlook for Edge Computing
The growing adoption of IoT across industries , exponentially increasing data volumes and network traffic and the rising demand for low-latency processing in addition to real-time, automated decision-making solutions, are some of the factors that are driving the growth of edge computing in India. The need for reliable connectivity with reduced downtime is further expected to fuel this growth. It can also be attributed to the fact that in remote places there is less possibility of a network problem with edge computing devices being located closer to end-users. Another benefit of edge computing devices is that they are capable of functioning efficiently on their own even if a neighbouring data center goes down as they handle essential processing functions natively.
Although the market for edge is currently dominated by North America and Europe, India’s market share is expected to witness huge growth (with the advent of 5G and the increasing interest to shift from the cloud) along with the whole Asia Pacific Region. According to Frost & Sullivan’s latest analysis, edge computing will be employed by 90% of enterprises by 2022, with the multi-access edge computing (MEC) sector estimated to reach $7.23 billion by 2024.
With an increased demand for processing and a rapid rise in data utilization, the companies that focus on the early adoption of emerging technologies like edge computing will have an edge over others in the market in making their services more seamless and well-positioned for customers.