In my last article, I was talking about the ‘Digital Metamorphosis.’ For this transformation to happen, it will have to begin with how fast is the turnaround either by providing a solution or solving any given problem in our day-to-day life.
Now let us understand What is Edge Computing? How will this bring forth the ‘Digital Disruption.’ According to the Wikipedia “Edge Computing is a method of optimising cloud computing systems by performing data processing at the edge of the network, near the source of the data.”.
With the technology evolution, there is also a growing demand to analyse data fast at the edge network. The big IT giants are already innovating in this space to address the approaches and use cases, for IoT application to be successful.
Let me explain how do I envision Edge Computing can help respond faster than ever before. Early this week there was a major train disruption in Singapore, which caused students appearing for their PSLE oral exams had to collect letters from the SMRT authority so that they could take their exams.
Assuming there was the Edge computing technology built-in where the smart sensors through their advanced intelligent capability transmit critical data and take action right at the device level responding to the problem immediately or even better is that if they can predict the problem which will help the authority to look into the fault and prevent such failures. To me, this is where IoT will influence how we live and do things in this world.
Gartner/Forbes estimates that there will be 25 billion things connected to the Internet and 50 billion IoT sensors by 2020. With this kind growth, it has become all the more critical that the Industry stakeholders focus on coming up with IoT/Edge devices which can perform edge analytics and help this world to act faster and prevent any problem even before it has occurred.
Let me give another real-time example how the technology can contribute to preventing acts such terrorism. Recently, there was an incident in Finland where the truck driver drove the vehicle into the crowds killing and injuring the people. The police upon investigation found that the man was intoxicated.
This kind of incidents, terrorism, and various crimes can be prevented with the adoption of the Edge technology. The smart sensors can be programmed to analyse that there is something wrong with the driver’s behaviour or any other parameters which it could potentially sense and take an immediate decision of sending an alert would have definitely helped in the police taking action even before this incident could have happened to save the lives of the innocent people who have become victims of many such crimes.
While I do see that companies like IBM, MicroSoft, Amazon, Google, Cisco, etc. are the early adopters to invest in innovation around the Edge Computing and are developing IoT platforms with edge computing capabilities.
To conclude, Today Edge Computing has become very critical for the business to respond faster. Even though this technology is still very nascent, I would like to see a big shift by the Industry stakeholders to come together in providing platforms and applications that will help realise the vision of making this world a ‘Safe City and Smart Nation”.
