A shift towards IoT and AI has resulted in the emergence of edge data centres.
According to a Markets and Markets report the edge data centre market size is expected to grow from USD 7.2 billion in 2021 to USD 19.1 billion by 2026, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 21.4 per cent during the forecast period.
The COVID-19 pandemic has boosted edge data centre solution adoption across industry verticals as the users move to leverage field service solutions advantages, such as expansions and less cost. Despite the global economic slowdown, around 50 per cent of subscription companies are expanding at a similar pace without any negative influence due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
During W.Media’s South Asia Digital Week 2022 India edition thought leaders from the technology industry gave insight into the emergence of edge computing in addition to cloud deployments to support mission-critical activities that require minimal latency.
They also spoke about increasingly investing in edge data centres in the upcoming years to speed up their applications and how extended reality technologies like IoT, AR, VR RPA will give a makeover to edge data centres during a panel discussion titled ‘Edge Data Centres – Pushing Towards the Edge For Accuracy’.
Edge DC scenario in India
The internet is growing continuously, and India has 744 million users accessing the internet via their mobile phones, analysts predict that it would reach 1.5 billion internet users by 2040.
“These numbers are growing exponentially, and another internet infrastructure is growing consistently and COVID19 taught a lesson to all of us about how to do your business remotely. The industry is moving towards a more and more connected and inclusive digital economy with a large amount of data being generated which could be text, images audio-video or any bit of structured unstructured data generated by a human connected device accessible from the internet by many people or intelligent device from many locations,” said Sampath Manickam, Senior Vice President – Information Technology, National Stock Exchange of India.
He further explained that the number of the connected devices will be at 38.6 billion globally by 2025 and 50 billion by 2030 and Gartner says this more than half of the enterprise generated data will be created for ourselves, outside the traditional data centre, and outside the cloud, and this number will reach 75 and above. This means the demand will grow due to the growth of many new business use cases and working remotely. It’s causing a greater percentage of data to be residing too close to the end-user to support new business use cases, even before calling the demand for a data centre.
“Many of the leading enterprises already have a robust strategy for cloud. This new trend of the edge data centre, which is growing rapidly, doing a pilot or started adopting or working towards adopting new technologies like the Internet of Things, blockchain content delivery network real-time video streaming video real-time video analytics, interactive online gaming, the interactive gaming is a big industry which will evolve in the near future.
Connected factories, smart cities, smart home online shopping, multi-party video conferencing using any device, not only mobile, laptop and TV, all these technologies would definitely need a local compute power closer to the end-user. All these technologies would need very low latency, in terms of the network latency, as compared to the traditional latency, they are talking about a millisecond or even less than a millisecond in a microsecond in some of those use cases. So applications need to process in real-time with ultra-low network latency,” added Manickam.
“I run the operation for one of the largest captive content delivery networks, along with real-time video streaming, OTT platform with real-time video analytics to support multi-million subscribers simultaneously, where edge data centre played a crucial role in the overall architecture of the flat platform within India, So the edge data centre is reality, and you will see more and more enterprises are adopting the big time,” Manickam explained.
Industry watchers opine that edge computing is a continuous journey and its adoption initially in the manufacturing sector was slow. “Now, in the last two to three years every manufacturing industry has had a mindset to migrate their own data centre to a cloud-based system,” said Ajay Ajmera, Head Digital & SAP, Shree Cement.
He further explained that initially, organisations had their own email system on-premise. Now, most of the manufacturing industry has migrated their email system to google cloud. Now the ERP is already moved to SAP and all the things are on the cloud, and the supply chain management and the supply chain tools are also implemented on the cloud.
There is a multi-cloud environment in organisations and previous organisations where all systems communicate through the multi-cloud.
“The security is also improving between the multi-cloud so the management of our organisation of nations have that mindset know we are in the safe hand, and the edge computing is very much required to the manufacturing industry now because the sales force is distributed across the globe where the salesman and marketing people will the get data to the device. Many of our plants have different geographical locations. There are so many challenges between the bandwidth and all the things now the cloud computing and edge computing they are, the centralised data,” added Ajmera.