The Intelligent Edge
Large-scale IoT solutions potentially produce vast amounts of data from a variety of sources like sensors, equipment and system integrations. One of the key problems is being able to ingest and process the data as it is received. IoT devices are often constrained by network latency and bandwidth limitations, and further complicating the task, data types are often very diverse.
An approach to optimizing data ingestion is to distribute computation. Edge hardware is also becoming increasingly capable of performing complex processing, including the possibility to aggregate, pre-process, filter or enrich data. Instead of processing all data centrally in the cloud, computation can be distributed and brought closer to the data source – to the edge.
An edge solution has several other advantages over traditional IoT solutions.
Latency and scalability: Processing data at the edge reduces latency since data must travel a shorter distance. Additionally, it provides the opportunity to carefully select what to send back to the cloud. When you only send the data that you really need, you potentially reduce the volume of data drastically as well as network bandwidth and cloud ingestion resources.