Where were you in January 2007 when the first iPhone was announced? I was in college, feeling pretty good about being the owner of a laptop, a digital camera, a graphing calculator, and a Nokia phone complete with an interchangeable faceplate and an unlimited texting plan. My digital life seemed impressive and immersive to me at the time, but it was worlds away from the connected nature of mobile devices and cloud computing that was on the horizon.

Smartphones and the Cloud

The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, but its introduction marked a fundamental shift in the internet. The internet became something that you could experience anywhere. People increasingly interacted with the internet through smartphone apps, rather than a traditional internet browser.

Cloud computing gained traction around the same time, changing how the industry approached software architecture. The cloud also brought changes to how consumers experienced the internet and how they thought about their data. Local storage became less necessary. Some offices abandoned their shared drives, opting to store and edit their documents in the cloud. Instead of downloading music to a personal device, you could stream music you bought from amazon or itunes from the cloud.

The way you experience the internet today is very different from the way you experienced it in 2007 and there is another change coming. Will you be ready?

The Edge

The internet is changing and the change is made possible by edge technology. Here are a few things you can expect:

There is a decentralization that is taking place within the inherent architecture of the internet. We are going from hundreds of mobile networks to potentially millions of private networks, which can all be connected with each other. Storage and compute is also being moved closer to the user / application with efforts being made in the micro and metro edge data center worlds. LatencyTime required to send data over two points in a network. More is the new currency of the Cloud.

Data is being produced at an ever increasing rate thanks to advances in connectivity, software, and hardware. This data is being produced at a rate that is quickly overwhelming transport capabilities and at the same time producing more noise than signal. Running machine learning at the edge is enabling businesses to find the signal within the noise much more quickly.

Businesses are looking to run applications closer to the user and need the ability to guarantee security, high availability, and resiliency. The pandemic forced an immediate shift to work from home and corporations are looking for solutions that deliver their corporate applications in a secure and highly available way with low latency. Edge plays a crucial role in this transition as businesses and individuals need an easy button for both application and network deployment.