The speed at which everything is getting connected shows digital business growth. With managed IT services, everything is at the tip of our fingers. The user expects instant experience every time while maintaining their privacy in the digital world. The up-scaled demand for real-time and quick business interaction is causing everyone to shift towards digitization. Business must adopt technology to survive. Faster development, agile approaches, and faster features are all essential to beat your competitors. Moreover, the continuing demand for real-time interactions demands better Managed IT services. The development is now shifting towards the “edge” of high expectations and low latency.

Let us discuss what exactly is meant by the term “edge”. By “edge” we mean as the service with which the end-user first interacts. For decades, businesses have been trying to raise the bar of this edge. They developed data centers on every corner of the world, improving their services to their customers. They often use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to help them in delivering their edge, eliminating the need for expensive developments. CDNs consist of typically more than 40 points of presence (PoP) around the world, providing a better edge to people. Today, there are CDNs comprised of thousands of PoPs to create a virtual Hyper edge, serving better content quality to users.

There are big and small edges, but does the size matter? Yes, it does. The size of the edge benefits the closeness to the users. We’ll dive into those benefits, examining why one should shift towards edge technology for instant customer experience, enhanced connectivity and security.

Proximity:

The distance between points matter. The further two aspects are, more latency will be expected. In other words, long-distance means distance for the data to travel across. The different perspective is, the longer the route, the more network hardware needs to be passed through, slowing the content delivery. Let’s explain this with an example. San Francisco and London are 8600km apart. If the speed of light in the fibre optics is 2×108 meters per second, making the minimum time for data travel to be around 40ms. This calculation doesn’t even consider whether the route is straight or not, the overhead of the network causing delays. Considering all the factors, the real-number would be somewhere near 140ms. The estimated number is too slow; however, with an Edge closer to your users, you can dramatically reduce time.

How big should an Edge be? Depending on your audience, for global audience 30-40, PoPs would offer you around 1500km from the users. The more PoPs you have, the more closer you get to your audience. The Hyper edge we mentioned earlier, having thousands of location access, reduces the distance around 400km. Being closer to the users will decrease the delay in the service, due to the less distance between edges and the users.

Connectivity:

Moving fast is essential for businesses to survive. Computing Solutions Companies require instant insights to take actions for better user satisfaction and customized user experience. This is possible by increasing machine to machines (M2M) technologies, such as IoT services: autonomous vehicles, smart cities, and manufacturing based on functionalities. Slight delay in your service could cause user irritation, dissatisfaction, or worst case, death. Proximity and IoT connectivity eliminate the delays and risks that come with it and enhances security.

Security:

As technology progresses, people who try to break it are getting smarter as well. Businesses need to protect their customers and their data, employees, and reputation. All could be at stake. Recent cyber-attack caused the breach of 3 Tbps data, a number no one heard of until three years ago. This kind of attack could overwhelm even the largest managed IT service providers.

Using edge can secure you from such attacks, scale in processing, redundancy, instant insights into traffic patterns, and customized latency for “good” traffic through the security check. This feature takes the burden off of your security layer at the origin.

There is no denying that we are in the era of well managed IT services, and Edge is the proof of that. Real-time business interactions are getting quicker, better, insightful, and secure with low latency.