Why everyone is talking about distributed cloud at the edge

By: Edgar Haren

For many organizations, data collected and analyzed at the edge has become an engine of digital business. The data enables real-time decision-making, operational efficiencies and innovative use cases.

The benefits of edge computing are clear, and interest in edge computing solutions seems as lively as ever. I believe part of the reason is due to the growing popularity of distributed cloud.

Companies in manufacturing, retail and healthcare are particularly well positioned to benefit from applications of distributed cloud at the edge. I’ll share some art-of-the-possible examples I’m seeing.

Let’s start with some background.

Distributed cloud at the edge

Distributed systems gained popularity years ago as they compiled multiple independent systems, allowing resources to be shared for greater efficiency and effectiveness. However, these systems had to be in the same geographical location. Over time, distributed systems gave way to mainframe computing, virtualization, as-a-service models and, more recently, cloud computing.

So, what helped rekindle and evolve interest in a distributed model?

• Broad public cloud adoption to extend technologies beyond the datacenter and enable mobile and edge use cases
• Deeper integration between cloud services to create a fabric or mesh of interconnected resources and data
• A digital bridge that allows organizations to connect their cloud environments to any other deployment type, whether it’s another public cloud, on premises or at the edge

The popularity of edge environments is driven by competitive advantage and technical enablement. With 75% of enterprise data being created and processed at the edge by 2025,¹ critical applications, business logic and an estimated 50% of all new infrastructure will be pulled towards the edge.²

Companies that analyze all relevant data and deliver actionable information are expected to achieve an extra US $430 billion in productivity gains over their less analytical and data-driven peers.³ The emergence of distributed cloud technologies allows organizations to create a seamless data pipeline from the edge to their datacenter and, ultimately, to the cloud

In addition to organizations wanting to disrupt the market and have more advanced technical capabilities, growth is driven by edge use cases and the push to use data capital to reduce operational inefficiencies.

Now, let’s explore how distributed cloud at the edge can drive impact in manufacturing, healthcare and retail.

Improving patient outcomes in healthcare with edge computing

Challenge
Connected healthcare aims to enhance patient outcomes using technology and connectivity solutions that enable communication and data exchange between healthcare providers, patients and other sources.

Why distributed cloud at the edge?
With the help of a unified data fabric, healthcare providers can combine device data with traditional structured data sources to gain deeper patient insights, analyze cross-patient symptomology and more effectively evaluate treatment efficacy.

Innovative technologies, such as temperature scanners, in-room patient dashboards and extended reality, can be deployed on-site to improve patient care. By utilizing distributed cloud solutions, hospitals and clinics can achieve complete interconnectedness, modernize their environments and improve outcomes throughout the patient lifecycle.
 

Driving revenue growth in retail with edge computing

Challenge
Many retailers are looking to build connected stores that drive top-line revenue through a 360-degree view of their customers.

Why distributed cloud at the edge?
Distributed cloud solutions can help by enabling smart retail solutions such as mobile point-of-sale devices, smart asset tracking, AI-driven video systems and electronic shelf labels.

The future for many retailers is to build a symbiotic shopping experience with their customers' smartphones—guiding their shopping paths, presenting real-time promotions and, most importantly, accelerating the intake of critical shopping data.

If retailers want to take advantage of distributed cloud at the edge, they need to assess their in-store technologies and identify their key objectives. Just like in manufacturing, they may need to update older infrastructure. This modernization will enable them to create an integrated data pipeline that can provide and merge data to offer personalized promotions, redistribute inventory and track purchasing patterns.

Reducing operational inefficiencies in manufacturing

Challenge
Manufacturers experience an average of 800 hours of equipment downtime each year.⁴ To put this into perspective, auto manufacturers can lose an average of US $22,000 per minute when production stops.⁵

Why distributed cloud at the edge?
To alleviate the costs of downtime and power new, innovative solutions such as digital twins, computer vision for anomaly detection, and augmented reality (AR) for maintenance and repair, manufacturing companies can deploy clusters at the edge. The clusters can be managed through a distributed cloud.

AR technology can increase the speed and quality of service activities, reducing service time and improving work quality. Security can also be improved through edge deployments, as video systems can be used to identify and mitigate security hazards while reducing human error.

Manufacturers can also explore options to build data pipelines to analytics platforms or business intelligence services, which can extract operational insights to improve production performance.
 

Hockey-stick growth curve

I believe the future of distributed cloud is bright as the demand for multicloud environments and edge computing continues to grow with a hockey-stick curve. Consider that by 2025, individuals and companies worldwide will produce an estimated 463 exabytes of data each day, compared with fewer than three exabytes a decade ago.⁶

The data will likely be ingested, consolidated, processed and acted on outside the datacenter. This transition from the datacenter creates an opportunity for distributed cloud to become the de facto and future-proof solution to address the data explosion, especially as hyperscalers continue to improve their data fabric and unified data management solutions.

Edgar Haren is a Senior Lead Offering Manager for Kyndryl.

1  Computing On The Edge Can Be Transformative — But Look Before You Leap, Forbes, March 2021
2  Edge Computing: Not All Edges are Created Equal, IDC, June 2020
3  Dark analytics: Illuminating opportunities hidden within unstructured data, Deloitte Insights, February 2017
4  Unplanned Downtime Costs More Than You Think, Forbes, February 2022
5  Distributed Cloud Market Size, Share, Competitive Landscape and Trend Analysis Report by Type, by Application, by Enterprise Size, by Industry Vertical, Allied Market Research, September 2022
6  Data ethics: What it means and what it takes, McKinsey Digital, September 2022