Tag: edge computing
Everyone in the manufacturing world faces the fear of going bust if they do not adopt digital transformation. That is a given and yet we can all agree that digital transformation doesn’t happen overnight.
Currently, enterprises encounter several challenges on their digital transformation journey. One among them is to learn to create and use data through a product life cycle that creates flexible manufacturing processes. Such processes can respond instantly to changes in demand at a low cost to the firm without damage to the environment.
Are you a manufacturer with global aspirations? Do you need to accelerate lead times and product customization? If so, then you may encounter these common business challenges:
- Need for critical infrastructure in remote locations.
- Need for tailored and full-custom design with high quality and ruggedness that fit your specific requirements.
- Need for a simplified supply chain that enables you to get to market quicker and realize faster time to revenue.
- Need to maximize efficiency in the supply chain and ultimately reduce lead time.
- Need to ensure product longevity by providing the same time-zone technical support. And to provide personal support services with the ability to decrease lead times.
Technologies such as 5G, edge computing, and cloud have been pushed further into the limelight especially over the past year, in the wake of the pandemic. As enterprises react to the changing world, these technologies are now emerging at the forefront as a necessary component of network infrastructure.
Read more: Take a Look at How 5G is Reinventing the Way We Work
How Do 5G, Cloud, And Edge Computing Unlock Enterprise Opportunities?
5G, cloud, and edge computing have become major areas of interest and investment at the enterprise level. They provide real-time insights, analytics, and business benefits that can be used once mission-critical latency issues are resolved.
5G, Edge Compute, and Cloud technologies are an emerging set of solutions. When orchestrated together these can enable a spectrum of benefits that are contingent on industry, maturity, and technology. These are complementary technologies that work together for most use cases.
What unlocks the enterprise opportunities is to marry new and existing technologies to create machinery that is as proactive and predictive as the best workers. Edge computing, cloud, and 5G connectivity can be combined to supercharge real-time decision-making and improve quality assurance throughout the supply line.
How would you like it if you can predict the future? Or if you could see the possible problems and correct them before they happen? 5G, edge computing, and cloud promise to give you that ability! These technologies are in a symbiotic relationship.
Cloud contains unlimited resources. Powered by 5G, AI models can continuously update and adapt to situations within the enterprise. This virtuous feedback loop delivers real-time results. Plus, it delivers ongoing improvements over time, as the entire system across the enterprise learns and improves from prior experiences.
This can greatly improve the productivity of your employees. Also, it can save costs tremendously as it can reduce downtime. Here are some specific ways in which 5G, edge computing, and the cloud can benefit the industry.
Read more: How 5G Will Boost Enterprise Investment In Cloud
Cloud For Responsive Resilience
In the past when enterprises needed to deploy applications using their equipment, they had to ensure that their server, memory, and processing power were equipped to run the application efficiently. Any misjudgment could have a cascading effect throughout the enterprise. However, the cloud provides infinite opportunities.
What enterprise opportunities does this provide? It provides what all enterprises need more than ever: increased speed, resilience, and flexibility.
Bringing cloud intelligence to their IT networks can be very beneficial in performing preventive maintenance, making decisions in real-time, and keeping data more secure. It allows for automated decision-making while saving bandwidth costs.
By leveraging cloud capabilities, enterprises can reduce overall costs. They can benefit from automated one-click deployment and realize higher value from data. This contributes to resilience. Resilience is more important to enterprises that are struggling during major disruptions like the pandemic.
Read more: Why It’s Time to Embrace Cloud and Mobility Trends To Recession-Proof Your Business?
5G Can Help Process Information Across The Enterprise
5G technology enables enterprise connectivity, remains powerful, and is constantly updated. 5G enables all the machines and modules to function at the same speed, reliability, and security as we expect from our phones. In other words, it prevents loss of time due to hanging or buffering associated with the mobile networks.
5G will deliver multiple benefits to those who adopt it:
- Provides ultra-reliability and security. It is far more efficient than any wireless mechanism.
- Since 5G eliminates the need for wired connectivity, it enables a high-speed environment with higher flexibility and lower latency.
- Provides the ability to handle mass customization and personalization.
- 5G augments IoT capacity to support device density and data volume
- Improves productivity as it reduces failure rates.
Read more: Top Business Drivers that Boost Legacy Cloud Migration
Edge Computing Can Help Deploy Technology With Unhindered Network Performance
Edge computing can reduce pressure on data centers and service provider networks. Plus, it preserves bandwidth and brings real-time processing close to users and their devices. Here are specific ways in which edge computing can prove advantageous:
- Maintain competitive edge: Edge computing can provide the ability to use data from various machines, processes, and systems to adapt the manufacturing processes in real-time. It can support precision monitoring of the production line. This enables swift operational responsiveness to unforeseen events. Additionally, it can gather data from connected systems and devices in real-time. Hence, manufactures can now analyze data at the point of creation leading to faster and more informed decision-making within the enterprise.
- Helps seize the opportunities that data and performance-intensive technologies present: Edge computing can empower employees and streamline workflows. It can enable smarter supply chains and improve employee safety and productivity.
- Documents at fingertips: Edge computing can provide workers easy access to documents, new workflow instructions, real-time videos and images, and new product updates. This can increase greater efficiency despite social distancing protocols in the current scenario.
Gain a Competitive Edge with Next-Gen Technologies
With IoT deployment on the rise, enterprises are increasingly adopting 5G, cloud, and edge computing. These technologies provide a competitive advantage by reducing unexpected downtime issues. Hence, the enterprises enjoy improved overall efficiency.
The convergence of these technologies can increase agility and resilience. These technologies can be leveraged to establish enhanced productivity, customer satisfaction, and increased ROI. Hence, 5G, cloud, and edge computing technologies must form an important part of any post-pandemic strategies. You must be eager to get started on gaining that competitive edge. Let’s get talking and make that happen!
How Can Your Business Benefit from Fog Computing?
How much data do we create every day? The World Economic Forum reports that the entire digital world is expected to reach 44 zettabytes by 2020. So, each day, we witness the colossal growth of data and this pace is only increasing with the growth of IoT. The agility and flexibility of big data applications are the foundation of the Internet of Things (IoT). The escalation of IoT has resulted in an increased volume of digitally generated data and managing that data has become a major challenge. This has led to the emergence of fog computing – an answer to the new challenges of computing technologies.
Read more: Gearing up for IoT in 2020
Defogging The Term Fog Computing
Let us start by defining it.
What is fog computing?
Fog computing is a decentralized computing infrastructure in which computing resources such as data, computers, storage, and applications are located between the data source and the cloud. This term refers to a new breed of applications and services related to data management and analysis.
According to Mung Chiang, Dean of the Purdue University, “fog provides the missing link for what data needs to be pushed to the cloud, and what can be analyzed locally, at the edge.” In simple terms, fog computing is a distributed network fabric that stretches from the outer edges of data creation to the point of storage.
Are fog computing and edge computing the same?
Edge computing is a subset or a component of fog computing. For example, if fog computing is compared to a basket of various fruits, edge computing would be one fruit from a single variety.
Edge computing refers to data being analyzed locally, at the point of creation. Fog computing encapsulates edge processing as well as the network connections required to bring that data from the edge (point of creation) to its endpoint.
Evidently, fog computing and edge computing are complementary.
Difference between fog computing and cloud computing
Just as the literal fog is a cloud closer to the ground, fog computing is stationed as a layer to reduce the latency in hybrid cloud scenarios. Cloud computing forms a comprehensive platform that helps businesses with the power to process important data and generate insights. Fog computing is like the express highway that supplies computing power to IoT devices which are not capable of doing it on their own.
Read more: Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure: How It Benefits Your Business
How Does Fog Computing Work?
Fog computing uses the concept of ‘fog nodes.’ These fog nodes are located closer to the data source and have higher processing and storage capabilities. Fog nodes can process the data far quicker than sending the request to the cloud for centralized processing.
The cloud is getting cluttered due to the enormous number of devices connecting to the internet. Since cloud computing is not viable in some cases, it has become necessary to use fog computing for IoT devices. It can handle the enormous data generated by these devices.
When implemented, fog-empowered devices locally analyze time-critical data that includes alarm status, device status, fault warnings, and so on. This minimizes latency and prevents major damage. Fog computing can effectively reduce the amount of bandwidth required, which in turn speeds up the communication with the cloud and various sensors.
Fog computing example:
If a user with a hand-held device wants to review the latest CCTV footage from a locally positioned IoT security camera, he would need to request the stream from the cloud since the camera does not have storage. This could take a bit of time, which can be eliminated with fog computing, where a local fog node can be accessed for video streaming which is far quicker.
Step-by-step Fog Computing Process:
- Signals are wired from IoT devices to an automation controller which executes a control system program to automate those devices.
- A control system program wires data through a protocol gateway.
- Data is converted into a protocol such as HTTP so that it can be understood easily by internet-based services.
- A fog node collects the data for further analysis.
- It filters the data and saves it for later use.
Read More: Fog Computing: The Catalyst For Efficient Data Processing
Key Takeaways for Your Business
- Increased business agility: It is evident that fog computing is cost-effective because it makes the production of revenue-generating products and services more efficient. It accelerates rollout cycles, broadens revenue bases, and reduces costs.
This revenue stream creates value for IoT fostering highly functioning internal business services. Fog computing also provides a common framework for seamless collaboration and communication helping OT and IT teams to work together to bring cloud capabilities closer.
- Privacy control: Fog computing facilitates better control of privacy because you can process and analyze sensitive data locally instead of sending it to a centralized cloud for analysis. It also enables the IT team to track, monitor, and control any device that collects or stores data.
- Data security: Since fog computing allows you to connect multiple devices to a network, it helps identify threats such as potential hacks, or malware. Additionally, such identified threats can be curbed at the device level without risking the entire network.
The Future is Fog Computing
Fog computing has several advantages over cloud computing. Fog computing can boost usability and accessibility in various computing environments. Soon, cloud computing for IoT may fade away but fog computing will take over. IoT is seeing an impressive growth rate and so it needs a special infrastructure base that can handle all its requirements. Fog computing is the key to accomplish this critical work. So get in touch with us and let’s get this happening for your business.