GUEST OPINION by Adam LePeilbet, Senior Director & General Manager, Data Centre Sales, Dell Technologies, ANZ: A North Queensland hospital delivers world-class healthcare to a remote population. Scientists analyse coral health at the Great Barrier Reef. A farm in Bendigo, Victoria, counts sheep at a regional livestock exchange.
What do these scenarios have in common?
They each represent an important time and place where valuable data is created and acted upon. This data, harnessed the right way, can create immediate, essential value and positively impact not only business outcomes but also critical health and safety outcomes. These places where data can be acted upon near the point of creation are referred to as the “edge.”
What is the edge?
The edge is everywhere and can be hard to define. As you can see from the examples above, your edge could be just down the hall from your data centre or drifting on a boat on the Great Barrier Reef. Most definitions of edge computing refer to moving computing power closer to data sources; it’s the practice of capturing, storing, processing and analysing data near where it’s generated – and it’s quickly transforming our world.
John Roese, Dell Technologies Global Chief Technology Officer of Products and Operations, says in his New Year’s resolutions for CIOs, “In 2023, more of your data and processing will be needed in the real world. From processing real-time data in factories to powering robot control systems, edge is expanding rapidly in the multicloud world”.
Edge computing is particularly beneficial in Australia, where it’s helping to meet the continuing growth in demand for emerging tech from industries like agriculture and healthcare. In rural locations, latency matters and technology needs to be brought closer; these industries rely on data processed at the edge to operate efficiently over large areas of land. The most significant opportunity for edge computing in Australia is its ability to support AI and automation, which will help grow these industries as they navigate the vast and often harsh landscape.
No matter what you call it or where you put it, the right approach to edge computing is specific to your industry and organisation. Implementing the right edge computing strategy can transform your business operations and outcomes by improving output quality and speeding up systems to make them as efficient as possible.
How to Tackle Your Edge
The process of implementing and operating edge computing isn’t always straightforward either. Edge initiatives often have unclear objectives, involve new technologies, and uncover conflicting processes between IT and operational technology (OT).
John Roese mentions that this year, CIOs “will need to make a choice about which edge architecture [they] want long term.”
With this in mind, here are three tips to help you kick off your edge strategy:
1. Design for business outcomes
Successful edge projects begin with a focus on the ultimate prize — the business outcomes. Agree upon and align your targeted business objectives well before you start discussing technology.
If you’re in manufacturing, for example, you might ask if you want to improve your production yields or reduce costs by a certain amount by proactively preventing machine failure and the associated downtime. Or, if you’re in retail, your goal may be to minimise shrinkage within a store to reduce inventory loss and improve the bottom line.
If your project will require a large investment with an initial limited return, document these business considerations and communicate them clearly. With specific business goals, you can manage expectations, measure your results as you go, and make any necessary mid-course corrections.
2. Consolidate and integrate
Look for opportunities to consolidate applications onto a single infrastructure to help your organisation realise significant savings on edge computing initiatives. Think of your edge not as a collection of disconnected devices and applications but an overall system enabling efficient operations. Virtualisation, containerised applications, and software-defined infrastructure are essential building blocks for a system that can allow consolidation.
In addition to being more efficient, edge consolidation provides greater flexibility. You can reallocate resources or shift workloads more easily to meet your business needs. Consolidating your edge also opens opportunities to share and integrate data across different data streams and applications. This will enable new applications to easily take advantage of the existing edge data without having to build new data integration logic.
As you consolidate, ensure that your edge approach leverages open application programming interfaces, standards, and technologies that don’t lock you into a single ecosystem or cloud framework. An open environment allows you to implement new use cases and applications and to integrate new ecosystems as your business demands change.
3. Plan for growth and agility
Take the long view. Plan for your initial business outcomes, but also look ahead and plan for growth and future agility. Think about the new capabilities you might need and new use cases you want to implement for growth.
For example, are you doing simple process control and monitoring today that you may want to use deep learning for in the future? If so, make sure that your edge infrastructure can be expanded to include the networking capacity, storage, and accelerated computing necessary to do model training at the edge.
Taking an as-a-Service approach with infrastructure can give IT more control of their environment and make it easier to put IT resources where they can reap the greatest value.
Capture your edge opportunity
The edge can be anywhere. And the data that can be captured and analysed from the edge can deliver business-changing outcomes. Look for a partner to help you define your edge, simplify your edge computing solution through consolidation and integration, and plan for growth with a strategy designed around outcome-based benefits. Now is the time to maximise the value of your business’s data and drive your business forward with actionable insights. Capture your unique edge opportunity.