Service declines, telecommunications businesses seek new playing fields

Cloud, telecommunications, device, and platform companies are competing for a piece of the pie as businesses invest in edge computing to make products and services faster, more secure, and cheaper.

Edge computing is quickly becoming the next frontier of digital transformation, and the potential scale of this space attracts companies of all types, from public cloud providers, management platforms, communications services, to infrastructure equipment manufacturers.

Deloitte Global estimates the enterprise market for edge computing will grow 22% through 2023, compared with 4% growth in spending on enterprise networking equipment and 6% of overall IT spending.

Deloitte Estimates Enterprise Edge Computing Hardware Investment Growth Rate

While most of this growth is likely to be driven by initial hardware spending, it will gradually shift to software and services as the market matures.

Cloud computing optimization solution

There are billions of Internet-connected devices today: smartphones, computers, security cameras, machine sensors. These devices generate huge amounts of data, much of which is run through cloud applications.

Experts estimate that as the number of connected devices explodes to 150 billion, it will generate 175 zettabytes of data by 2025. This makes it increasingly costly and inefficient to send data to the cloud for processing. Furthermore, this model may not provide real-time data or meet the response time requirements of newer applications. As a result, many organizations are looking at a hybrid cloud model that can augment existing technologies with edge computing.

Edge Computing is an architecture designed and built to optimize cloud computing systems by allowing data processing and computation at the edge, closest to the source of data generation and processing requests (IoT devices).

The new "playground" is becoming crowded with the presence of many big names.

Edge locations can be as diverse as an enterprise's on-premises servers, a communications service provider's central office or cell tower, a hyper-scaler regional data center, an end-user device, or anywhere in between.

Potential "piece of cake" for network operators

Because data doesn’t have to travel far, using edge computing can help reduce network resources, cut transportation costs, improve reliability, reduce latency, and most importantly, increase businesses’ control over data and applications.

For example, when edge computing is combined with advanced connectivity options like 5G, it can deliver flexible, near-real-time response times for data-intensive, AI-enabled, or time-sensitive applications.

Giants are regionalizing and scaling global cloud infrastructure into smaller formats, allowing customers to run workloads on-premises or near-site.

As a result, many are partnering with network operators (CSPs), content delivery networks, cell tower owners, and distributed network infrastructure owners to place micro-edge cloud platforms close to potential customers.

Deloitte research shows that CSPs can benefit from providing edge computing solutions that combine secure and reliable connectivity to enable applications that require real-time data, such as using 5G networks to provide edge services for on-demand computing, storage, security, etc., or developing their own B2B and B2C applications tailored to each business' needs.

(According to Deloitte)

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