Today, more than ever, it’s crucial to ensure your end user experiences service that is fast, powerful and available, as demand continues to spike amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The coronavirus has brought edge computing, and edge data centers further into focus as hundreds of millions of students and employees continue studying and working from home. This has created huge increases in demand and traffic on networks around the world and applications like Zoom.
Get the full report.
A new report from EdgeConnex highlights how today, “innovators win by rethinking how to deliver the best experience for their users.”
And as such, in today’s markets — whether you’re a legacy leader or a new entrant, in network and mobile, content and digital media, cloud and IT services, emerging tech, or gaming – cost efficiently delivering a better user experience than your competitors is the key to winning, the report points out.
According to the report, the “legacy approach” to centralized data centers and core networks is not longer enough to satisfy user demand, and can create challenges around capacity, lower latency and costs. But there may be a solution to these challenges.
The report sees the solution in edge data centers. Edge data centers can help solve for these issues by moving computing and data storage closer to the end-user — “enabling higher capacity, lower latency and reduced expenditures.”
If you’re only in the top data center markets, you’re not close enough to all of your customers. In a world where ‘slow is the new down’ that’s a huge competitive disadvantage.” — EdgeConnex
How does this work?
Well, according to the new white paper, geographic proximity and network connectivity work together to deliver low latency.
“High-density power ensures you can run the kinds of compute-intensive technologies that many modern applications demand. Scalability ensures you have the compute, storage, and network capacity required to deliver for your users, no matter how fast their demand rises,” the report states.”
In other words, low latency is key to great experience, and to achieve it, one needs capacity within geographic proximity to your users.
Localizing data acquisition and control functions — and the storage of high bandwidth content and apps in closer to the end user — can aid edge computing facilities in getting around distance, capacity constraint challenges and more that can arise with traditional internet architecture.
Localizing data processing is key, but connectivity matters, too, if achieving low latency is the end goal.
As network traffic increases, the importance of efficiently distributed network capacity, and an adequate diversity of network access solutions ramps up, as well.
So, how do localized and proximate edge data centers help cut down on network bottlenecks, reduce latency and improve performance?
“They do this by enabling peering at the edge and acting as local gateways for high speed connections not only to the core, but also to other edges,” the report states.
The edge and the core can work hand in hand, and allow business to optimize traffic flows, choosing for themselves and their own specific needs where data computing should occur.
According to EdgeConnex, “The edge is not a location. It’s how you cost efficiently deliver the user experience that will keep you on the competitive edge.”
See the full report, “User Experience is Everything,“ courtesy of EdgeConnex,” to explore further how edge computing is changing the data center landscape.