Advantages of edge computing

 1. Saving bandwidth

The proliferation of smart devices means we’re creating an extraordinary amount of data. But not all of that data is critical. Revisiting our security camera example, if you have multiple cameras on a site, and each one is constantly streaming data to the cloud, then that’s using a lot of bandwidth for potentially not very useful data. But if the cameras are intelligent enough to process the data at its source, they can stream only the most important footage to the cloud, while discarding the rest.

2. Reducing latency

Another advantage of devices being able to sort critical data from the not-so-critical data is a reduction in latency (i.e., the time it takes to send data and receive a reply). With cloud computing, the device may be sending information to a data center on the other side of the world for processing, and this often results in a brief delay. This doesn’t always matter; for example, most of us don’t mind that it typically takes Alexa a few seconds to reply to our question about today’s weather.

But that lag time is far less acceptable in the context of, say, a self-driving vehicle out on the road. If another car runs a stop sign, do you really want your autonomous vehicle to have to send that sensor and visual data to the cloud, then wait for a decision on what to do next? Not so much. With edge computing, critical data – data that’s absolutely vital to real-time decisions – can be processed on the spot, resulting in faster decisions—the closer the processing, the quicker the response time, essentially. Meanwhile, the data that’s not so time-critical (for example, fuel performance data) can be sent to the cloud for later analysis.

3. Enhancing security and privacy

Edge computing reduces the amount of data that has to travel over a network, which is an obvious bonus from a security perspective. There’s also the fact that data is distributed (in this case, located on multiple user devices) as opposed to being stored in one place. This is all good news, providing manufacturers of smart products make securing that local data a key priority.