By Faheem Tabassum

As Wired magazine said as long ago as 2017, 'Big, distant data centers can't support VR and self-driving cars—but "edge computing" can.'

The questions every enterprise therefore need to consider are straightforward: what is "Edge", and what does it mean for my organisation?

People get confused with what Edge means, how it delivers value to businesses, how it enables businesses to become more flexible, how it delivers value to their customers, and where 5G will play a crucial part in making Edge meaningful and real.

So let's start with clarifying the definition: at Optus "Edge" means "Edge Cloud" - the implementation of cloud solutions much closer to the user.

Cloud computing is ubiquitous. Bain & Co. predicts that the market will be worth around US$390 billion in 2020. Its implementation across the world, across multiple vertical markets, has changed the way we all do business, and changed the way we interact as customers and consumers with businesses. It's also enabled the rise of mobile, and mobile's evolution from voice to everything.

Edge Cloud is the next evolution, and there are a number of different ways that Edge Cloud can be implemented, giving enterprises a number of options they can now start to consider.

Traditionally, cloud services have always been somewhere distant, with the data servers and processing power on the other side of a city, the other side of a country, or the other side of the world.

Edge Cloud allows for many more options. Consider a continuum that starts with on-premise Edge Cloud, or Enterprise Edge Cloud, with services, servers and connectivity sitting inside an asset attached to an enterprise.

Examples include:

• a factory with its own Edge Cloud system to provide low-latency processing to manufacturing systems that might typically involve robots and other automated systems
• a car with its own processor, required for autonomous vehicles connected to either a site or a city, with centralised process operations across a wide area, requiring very low latency
• a house having its own Edge Cloud system that creates a smart home with remote lighting control, remote security monitoring system, or automatic systems activated by how close you are to your home
• an office building with a building management system controlled by its on-premise Edge Cloud system.

These Enterprise or on-premise Edge Cloud services are built to meet the needs of the organisation that owns the assets. On-premise Edge Cloud is very close to the customer, delivering the lowest-possible latency and the highest-possible transaction speeds, across 5G networks.

Moving away from the premises or assets, we have the Network Edge Cloud, which has three flavours of its own. These cloud assets are available to a number of customers, aren't built for any individual customer, and aren't built to unique or bespoke specifications.

The three flavours shown in the diagram, moving further away from the on-premise Edge Cloud, are the "Metro Edge Cloud", the "Metro Far Edge Cloud" and the "Regional Far Edge Cloud".

The closer the enterprise and its users are to the Edge Cloud, the lower the latency and the better the user experience. Anyone who has worked on VPNs for remote desktops will remember the delays in doing useful work, delays measured in seconds between pressing 'Enter' on your keyboard and seeing a response on your screen. As the processor gets closer to the user - from the Regional Far Edge Cloud to the Metro Far Edge Cloud to the Metro Edge Cloud or even to the on-premise Edge Cloud, the speed improves, and the customer and user experience improves.

5G therefore provides a diverse range of deployment options. One (with 5G Standalone Architecture) allows for local data breakout, meaning that the core network is physically integrated in close vicinity to the actual 5G radio site. If a localised Cloud Edge server is then ‘plugged in’ to this local core, data can be processed and delivered locally. It doesn’t need to traverse through traditional ISP exchange centres - which significantly improves latency, crucial for performance in many enterprise applications.

It’s also the case that, with the possibility of taking processing power and storage away from the end-user (for example, away from smartphones) Edge Computing can take over the processing, or rendering, or other complex decision-making for a variety of applications. Businesses will then no longer require specialised hardware to fulfil specific functions – which will now be delegated to high-end Edge servers. This is again where 5G comes in: the Edge server does all the heavy ‘grunt’ work, using high volumes of data from the end-user, and with large amounts of data being sent back to the user. 5G will carry these high-speed, high-volume data loads necessary to support the decision making by the Edge compute servers.

This capability is now being built here in Australia and around the world. Telcos such as Optus are best-positioned to provide Edge Cloud services because we own the infrastructure assets that make Edge Cloud possible, all the way from towers between cities, to the enterprise in a particular city suburb.

Though still early days, enterprises need to plan now, but also to tread carefully. Gartner makes two assumptions in a recent report: that by 2022, more than 50% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside the data centre or cloud; and that half of edge computing solutions that worked as proofs of concept (POCs) will fail to scale for production use.

Enterprises can now start to consider the following:

• explore the business opportunities that the Edge Cloud can address
• understand the way different Edge Computing "flavours" might apply to the enterprise - basically, how close to the business should the data processing capability be, and which Edge Cloud option best fits the needs of the business
• test assumptions, and consider early proof-of-concepts modelling

It's fair to claim that Edge Cloud services will revolutionise business. It's going to reduce the time that data is produced and analysed, to seconds or less, which in turn will mean that businesses will have the opportunity to claim competitive advantage, create new customer experience, collaborate with new partners in new ways, including globally, and build new solutions to new problems.

More information and content on 5G and how your organisation can benefit can be found here: https://www.optus.com.au/enterprise/5g