The Information Technology (IT) team is the central nervous system of the organization. IT is the title given to those who collect, store, process, and protect a company’s data. Edge computing is a buzzword in IT circles that essentially means that soon your phone will be powering the cloud, rather than simply accessing a cloud database located in Mongolia.
What is Information Technology?
In a company, the central nervous system is called the IT department. The brain collects, stores, and processes information. Nerves help us sense the world around us, and they also serve as messengers between the brain and the rest of the body. The spinal cord protects and connects all the moving parts.
For a human being, the nervous system is made of the brain, the spinal cord, and individual nerves. IT training courses teach you how to develop technical systems that allow a company to communicate in a secure way with customers and stakeholders as well as internal communication.
What is IoT?
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a giant network of interconnected devices. The key word here, is devices. We are no longer talking about cellphones and tablets, but cars, watches, and even paperback books with QR codes.
Sensors are embedded in physical devices, which allow for interactions between otherwise “dumb machines.”
What is Edge Computing?
Edge computing is the democratization of storage, especially in regards to IoT data.
According to The Verge, it is cloud storage that does not rely on any one location. “Instead of relying on the cloud at one of a dozen data centers to do all the work. It doesn’t mean the cloud will disappear. It means the cloud is coming to you.”
21st century has quickly proven to be a fertile ground for companies that use mass teamwork. Google Drive, Dropbox, and YouTube, for example, can store the files you don’t have room for on your machine.
Presently, IT companies and private individuals output 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. Not all of it is in the cloud, but what is in the cloud is protected and stored by physical data storage centers. The task of the modern data center is to manage and secure the physical data in servers.
The way the cloud currently works is that users store data on private storage units mostly owned by Amazon. These are called data servers. Any device with internet can access this data stash –be it under the name of ICloud, Google Cloud, or Dropbox – but the physical information storing machines are owned by a handful of companies and kept in a few massive storage locations.
According to The Verge, what defines edge computing is distributed storage. This is a system where you never really know where your information is. It moves from device to device. The idea is for IoT devices that actually access the data like smart shoes or Fitbits to share the burden of having to store the massive amount of info a data center handles by storing and managing a tiny percentage of the total bulk.
Benefits of Edge Computing:
- Minimizes latency
- Compatible with IoT
- Reduces IT costs
- Less bandwidth
- Faster Load Speed
The total amount of IoT devices in the world is projected to grow to 75.44 billion worldwide by 2025. Edge computing was developed as a response to the expected increase in IoT data use. Where will we store all our information becomes a very urgent question when human beings are producing 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day.
Conclusion
Once upon a time, we would store all our information ourselves in disks and drives. Then came the cloud and you could access your files from anywhere in the planet using pretty much any device with internet capability.
Edge computing is the thing that comes after simple cloud storage. It is a form of distributed cloud storage. In edge computing, it is the individual devices that use the information, meaning your property, that becomes the unit by which all of us store our collective information.
It is yet another step into a future where data is open, free, and accessible to all.
