27 Sep 21
Cloud computing has had a significant development during the last decade: it has changed how organizations manage their day-to-day operations. From an online activity linked to personal computing, we went to a model of distributed computing: technology acts as a bridge that allows individuals and organizations to stay constantly connected.
In the last few years, starting off this distributed framework, there’s been a new paradigm of computing: edge computing, that complements cloud computing on certain occasions and on others it directly replaces it. Here at Transparent Edge and with this article we want to tell you why edge computing is a key strategy for the technological future of the European Union.
Edge computing is a paradigm of distributed computing that brings the processing and storage of data closer to the location where it’s generated.
The main benefit, and this is where its disruptive nature lies, is that it enables real-time decision making, based on the analysis of large volumes of data. This is especially important in a world where data has multiplied exponentially, and it will continue to do so with the development of, among other things, the IoT (internet of things) and artificial intelligence.
With edge computing, the computing goes from the cloud to the edge of the network and it eliminates the need to send data to the cloud for processing, which guarantees minimum latency and a significant reduction in bandwidth usage.
These would be the main technological advantages of edge computing. But to this we also have to add the strategic advantage related to data privacy. Let’s expand on this:
Edge computing avoids the need for the data (after its generation) to be transferred to a central node for its processing. These nodes are, generally, servers offered by cloud providers that are often located outside of the European Union’s territory: this puts them in jurisdictions that are under non-European regulations, with inferior data protection standards.
Under the premise of potential threats to national security, US legislation allows the US government (note: intelligence agencies) to access data stored by US technology companies.
To keep the data processing within the EU -thanks to edge computing- becomes extremely relevant, regarding the effort that the European Commission is making to guarantee the European data protection standards, and European sovereignty over the data.
If we take a moment to reflect on this, we will see that this is particularly important when it comes to industrial data and critical facilities.
This is key especially after seeing what has happened with personal data before European authorities started focusing full time on privacy protection: the estimation is that 92% of data from Western countries was stored in the United States in 2019.
Having explained all of this, it’s probably easier to understand the numbers presented by the 2030 Digital Agenda: the European Commission wants 80% of European data processing to be done at the edge by 2025. And by 2030, the goal is to have 10,000 edge nodes deployed across European territory. The estimation is that, out of those, 1,000 will be in Spain.
Edge computing, as you can see, is here to stay. Not only does it open the door to a new scenario for low-latency applications that didn’t exist until now, but it also is of high relevance for the EU (strategically speaking). The EU doesn’t have big tech companies like the ones you find in the US, but it has large industrial and services companies that need data to continue with the 4.0 industry development. There’s also a big network of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) with great capabilities for technological development.
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