It’s always been interesting watching IT trends – especially the trends of how experts recommend that companies handle their data. For the first few decades of computing, both computing and data storage were done locally at a business. Companies with highly sensitive data quickly figured out that it made sense to keep a backup copy of data on tapes offsite – but computing was firmly embedded in company IT departments and local computers.

In roughly 2010, as data centers started to become popular, IT experts advised companies to store data in remote data centers. This morphed quickly into also placing operating software directly in data centers. This supposedly saved money on software and made sure every desktop was up to date, and this led to cutbacks in local IT staff.

It quickly became apparent that data centers weren’t always the best solution, and the idea of edge computing was circulated as early as 2013. Edge computing advocates argue that some functions are most efficiently handled locally and not in distant data centers. Today, it’s hard to find any discussion of corporate computing that doesn’t consider edge computing.

The advantages of edge computing are easy to understand:

• Edge computing saves money on broadband. Companies have been convinced that they shouldn’t throw away data, and this has led to an immense increase in the amount of data that is being generated and stored. However, it’s expensive and wasteful to ship and store unneeded data in data centers, and many companies are now screening data and only sending important data to the cloud.
• There is increased anxiety about hacking. The absolutely safest way to keep data from hackers is to store it locally in a way that is not connected to computer networks or the cloud. You can’t hack data for which there is no computer access.
• Many computing functions now require low latency, and it takes too long to ship data to a data center for computing and send back the results quickly enough for low latency needs.
• Edge computing is needed for any function that can’t tolerate interruptions or outages. Many businesses that cease functioning during a broadband outage are reconsidering the concept of working locally instead of in the cloud.

As the title of the blog says, edge computing is everywhere. Following are just a few examples:

• There was once a vision of operating smart vehicles using low-latency 5G connections. But there will never be reliable 5G along every road, and vehicles today are self-contained data centers that include a dozen computers.
• Smart Homes. The vast majority of smart-home devices can work without a connection to the cloud.
• Automated factories cannot tolerate broadband outages and often also need extremely low-latency connections. The solution is computers located at the factory, along with fiber or high-speed wireless connections directly into manufacturing equipment.
• Healthcare monitoring. It’s dangerous for patients to use monitoring technologies that rely on the cloud to function.
• Smart Grid. One of the key functions of smart grid networks is the ability to quickly restore power after an outage when there might be no cloud broadband.
• Content Caching. Content providers like Netflix now cache content locally on networks to save on sending a separate copy to each viewer in a neighborhood.
• Smart Traffic. We don’t want traffic lights that stop working during broadband interruptions.

I could fill a few pages with examples. It’s likely that every reader of this blog encounters a few edge computing applications every day.