As more data and processing needs exist and are growing rapidly at the edge, providers and customers are exploring methods to avoid the bandwidth, latency, and overall costs of backhauling content to the traditional data center. Instead, the industry is moving towards enabling the more intense computational needs closer to where this data and content is gathered and presented.
According to IDC (1), 50% of new enterprise IT infrastructure deployed will be at the edge by 2023, and there will be an 800% increase in the number of apps at the edge by 2024. The industry is already looking for innovative methods to uniformly operate in this greatly scaled out environment.
We talked with many customers looking at these needs in areas such as service providers, hosting providers, enterprise branch, retail, defense, and many others, they have shared some common requirements: