As the future revolution in technology evolves with artificial intelligence, virtual reality and machine learning, the demand for data centers and our modern day reliance on them will skyrocket. Smart devices, smart spaces and the universal growth of connected things delivering huge amounts of information all intersecting at the data center over wireless connections creates the need for data centers to be able to scale for the future and the increased workload ahead.

New innovations in Artificial Intelligence (AI), the development of computer systems to perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence, are being used with greater efficiency to optimize resource management and long-term planning for strategic business decisions.  Additionally,  AI driven data centers themselves are a necessity for any progressive business that wants to achieve an operationally efficient computing environment.  In order to compete, all companies will need to become data driven in gathering large amounts of information about their customers.  This only fuels the workload on the data center industry tremendously; as well as, the new types of businesses entering into the global economy to be able to interact with new technologies as they evolve. Exciting times are ahead for the data center market as futurist Steve Brown discusses at Open Compute Summit.  Read full article here.

Planning for the future optimization of your technology architecture?  With the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) using the the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in manufacturer settings, utilizing edge computing solutions is going to be critically important in capturing data from smart machines to increase efficiency in operations, quality control and supply chain management.  Helping companies generate massive amounts of data and bridging the gap between information and operational technology is the goal of using IIoT technology in the first place.  However, if the data is unable to be accessed and processed in real time of the smart “things” that live remotely on the “edge” of the network to collect the data is lost and potentially not as valuable .  

Edge computing helps with the challenge of harnessing information and making it relevant to the business for decision making purposes by being able to process data closer to where it lives.  With the growth in IIoT capabilities, edge computing is being looked at as the next generation in cloud computing where there is more movement away from the cloud towards edge computing devices.  Eliminating the need for costly network bandwidth additions, addressing sensitive data security issues and improving enterprise-wide connectivity can all be alleviated with the utilization of edge computing solutions.  Read full article here.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) surges in the coming years, will edge computing make cloud computing obsolete?  Certainly a hot topic among the CIO community in an effort to predict the future is the cloud-to-edge debate as more and more data is generated that needs to be analyzed effectively.  But, how will the cloud and the edge co-exist in the future and what does the architecture look like for this massive amount of data that is putting a  tremendous amount of  strain on the Internet infrastructure?

Some venture capitalists are saying that the amount of devices that make up the IoT will make edge computing the next leg in the computing cycle as the need for large amounts of computation that currently takes place in the cloud will need to move to the edge for faster decision making capabilities thus disrupting the cloud.  Autonomous vehicles and machine learning for instance will have to have its’ own self contained computing capabilities as the speed at which decisions need to be made don’t have time for the data to be transmitted to the cloud.  This is a scary thought for cloud service providers, but one that will soon take shape as the next IoT innovations evolve.  Read full article here.