Edge Computing

What Is Edge Computing?

Traditional data computing houses data in a centralized location. However, as brands and retailers employ various technologies that enable them to collect increasingly more amounts of data, these data centers can easily get overloaded. Edge computing helps solve this issue by moving data storage capabilities to the outskirts of the data center and closer to where the data originated from.

Say a retail store gathers specific customer data through various payment transactions, for example. In traditional computing, the system would send the data to the data center, which would then process and compute that data to derive insights for the retailer. In this system, the data center does much of the heavy lifting, which can result in disruptions or bandwidth limitations. With edge computing, the system would process the data at the retail location, then send the insight over to the data center to avoid overloading the system.