Everyday devices are becoming more powerful, reducing data center loads and complementing—or in some cases leapfrogging—cloud capabilities to drive exciting new IoT applications.
While many of today’s always-connected tech devices take advantage of cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT) manufacturers and application developers are starting to discover the benefits of doing more compute and analytics on the devices themselves.
Moving intelligence to the edge of IoT
If you get a lot of data as is the case when you leverage IoT in such end-to-end ways or even in specific highly sensor-intensive and thus data-intensive environments whereby data is generated at the edge which by definition happens in IoT as your data sensing and gathering devices ARE at the edge,you inevitable encounter challenges on levels such as bandwidth, network latency, speed overall and so forth where fog and edge computing play a role. In IoT applications with a mission-critical and/or remote component the need for speed and for different approaches such as edge computing is even more important.
Edge computing is focused on devices and technologies that are attached to the things in the Internet of Things such as industrial machines (GE).
Depending on the context and scope of the project you want the data you need fast. Or better: you need the aggregated and analyzed data, in the shape of actionable intelligence, enabling you to take actions and decisions, fast, whether these decisions are human or not. So, you don’t need all that data to store it and analyze it in the cloud but you only want that bit of data traveling across your networks.
Speed of data and analysis is essential in many industrial IoT applications but is also a key element of industrial transformation and all the other areas where we move towards autonomous and semi-autonomous decisions made by systems, actuators and various controls.
That degree of autonomy is even at the very core of many of the desired outcomes and of the goals in, for instance, Industry 4.0 as we move towards the next stage of the third platform which is all about autonomy.
