Edge Computing: The 2 things tech leaders should know

It's no secret that more and more computing workloads are moving to the cloud, and will continue to move to the cloud in the years ahead. In 2018, 10% of companies have shut down their traditional data centers in favor of the cloud. By 2025, that number will be 80%, according Gartner.

But this centralization of data, computing power, and intelligence has its drawbacks, and there are important and cutting edge scenarios where sending every transaction to the cloud is too inefficient and not fault tolerant enough.

That's where edge computing comes in. If you're trying to get your head around what edge computing has to offer, here's where to start:

1. It's necessary for critical scenarios

Edge is mostly about computing-intensive, high-availability, mission critical applications that are sometimes geographically remote from computing centers. So we're talking about things like self-driving cars, oil rigs, wind turbines, medical robots, airplanes, mining vehicles, and logistics infrastructure.

Edge computing makes it possible for these technologies to always function at a high level by having the capability to function like a local data center if connectivity is interrupted.

2. It's closely connected to IoT and 5G

What edge computing really enables is the industrial Internet of Things applications that can become mission critical by functioning fully even if the internet hiccups.

5G is going to provide the kind of bandwidth that will empower these mission critical applications being pushed out to the boundaries of the network, while edge computing will provide the high availability and fault tolerance needed to guarantee uptime and performance.

Special report

To go deeper on on this topic, see our ZDNet/TechRepublic special report From Cloud to Edge: The Next IT Transformation. You can read all of the articles on ZDNet or you can download them in one PDF on TechRepublic, available for free to registered users.

ZDNet's Monday Morning Opener

The Monday Morning Opener is our opening salvo for the week in tech. Since we run a global site, this editorial publishes on Monday at 8:00am AEST in Sydney, Australia, which is 6:00pm Eastern Time on Sunday in the US. It is written by a member of ZDNet's global editorial board, which is comprised of our lead editors across Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America.

Previously on Monday Morning Opener:

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• The race to ruin the internet is upon us
• How the iPhone lost its crown to the Apple Watch
• The 3 golden rules for winning IT budget victories
• The AI, machine learning, and data science conundrum: Who will manage the algorithms?
• Why Facebook is powerless to stop its own descent
• GOAT uses machine learning, computer vision to verify your top dollar sneakers
• Windows 10: Swapping the big bang for the long grumble
• Report from an almost cashless society
• The 4 hottest tech trends that are transforming the world in 2018
• How Fortnite approaches analytics, cloud to analyze petabytes of game data