Amanda Regnerus, executive vice president, product and services at US Signal, explains how coupling the cloud with edge data centers can enable organizations to maximize the potential of both approaches and significantly reduce latency.Â
As the demand for faster and more efficient technology grows, several industries are turning to faster, compliant, secure, and cost-effective technologies. Industries such as healthcare and manufacturing, as well as technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), autonomous vehicles (AV), and internet of things (IoT) especially need these technologies due to the challenges of latency.
Latency refers to the time it takes for a data packet to travel from its origin point to its destination. For many industries and technologies, a single second too slow can mean the difference between efficiency and disaster.
The issue of latency, coupled with the possible issues legacy IT infrastructures can cause, cannot be solved by employing centralized models such as cloud computing and on-premises data centers. The modern demands on technology and the expectations from consumers and businesses means that applications need to be latency-tolerant, and there are several ways this can be accomplished.
DevOps teams could look into redesigning the application. However, this usually negatively impacts user experience, and attempting to build latency-sensitive applications in a hyperscale cloud environment can be extremely challenging.
Another option would be to move the IT infrastructure, applications, and other resources closer to the source of the data to reduce latency. However, several factors may not make it feasible. Space, power, cooling, staffing, and connectivity constraints can obstruct a business from implementing this.
Another way to help reduce latency is multi-protocol label switching (MPLS)Opens a new window network architecture. MPLS network architecture enables organizations to manage data capacity, prioritize different services, and, therefore, prevent bandwidth congestion. However, this type of technology was never designed as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and is often ill-equipped to accommodate today’s connectivity demands.
The solution to this problem is edge data centersOpens a new window . An edge data center is a data center that is in local proximity to the user and can provide the compute, storage, and other resources for processing data. The location of the data center reduces the distance in which the data has to travel, thus reducing the latency.
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Benefits of Edge Data Centers
Edge data centers Opens a new window are benefiting several industries in various ways. For example, in healthcare, the reduction in latency that edge data centers provide is allowing medical professionals to receive data on their patients faster and make important (sometimes life-saving) decisions more efficiently. In manufacturing, edge data centers benefit manufacturing sites that may be in remote locations where network connectivity is inconsistent or not cost-effective.
Many companies are moving their traditional enterprise applications to the cloud, but this is causing these organizations to hit walls as they realize that the cloud has its restrictions and doesn’t eradicate latency. The answer to this is a hybrid of the cloud and edge data centers.
Utilizing a data center and managed services provider means that businesses can benefit from cloud solutions and edge data center technologies. An efficient provider will be able to assist in transforming a business’s IT operations and continuously meeting the ever-changing technology and business needs.
The cloud is a big part of modernizing IT technology. However, the process of increasingly moving large amounts of data back and forth between far distanced data centers via the cloud inevitably causes latency issues. Coupling this with edge data centers means that organizations can maximize the potential of both approaches and significantly reduce latency, increasing the efficiency of new technologies (such as AI, IoT, and AV) and assisting industries in operating more effectively.
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