Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 33 | Page 20

INFOGRAPHIC INFOGRAPHIC Defining ‘The Edge’ E dge Computing is continuing to increase in popularity due to the numerous business benefits the technology offers. According to a new market research report published by MarketsandMarkets, the Edge Computing market size is expected to grow from US$2.8 billion in 2019 to US$9 billion by 2024, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 26.5% during the forecast period. Vertiv, a company which brings together hardware, software, analytics and ongoing services to ensure its customers’ vital applications run continuously, perform optimally and grow with their business needs, created the infographic to present a simplified approach to understanding a modern digital ecosystem. The company, which estimates there will be about 23 billion connected devices in use by 2021, decided to analyse the universe of Edge use cases. It identified the top 24 use cases, based on projected growth, criticality and financial impact. These cases were analysed for common characteristics such as bandwidth, latency, availability and security, and were categorised into one of four archetypes. and local processing unit (local data centres) in the overall edge computing process. The adoption of edge computing solutions among large enterprises is high owing to the increased generation of data, which is attributed to the widespread geographical presence and customer base. Moreover, the increasing demand of employees to access computing resources and applications ubiquitously while ensuring proper data storage, drives the demand of edge computing solutions among large enterprises. For instance, large manufacturing companies need to correlate voluminous data generated from sensors or actuators attached to their physical assets, such as machines, turbines, factories, and lifts with historic information. Subsequently, this helps them to detect or forecast failures in the shortest possible time for avoiding downtime and loss in production. Based on components, the edge computing market has been segmented as follows: • Hardware • Platform • Services Based on applications, the edge computing market has been segmented as follows: • Smart cities • Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) • Remote monitoring • Content delivery • Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) • Others (autonomous vehicles, drones and gaming) Based on organisation sizes, the edge computing market has been segmented as follows: • Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) • Large enterprises Based on verticals, the edge computing market has been segmented as follows: • Manufacturing • Energy and utilities • Government and defence • Telecommunications • Media and entertainment • Retail and consumer goods • Transportation and logistics • Healthcare and life sciences • Others (education and banking, financial services, and insurance) n The four archetypes are: data intensive, machine to machine latency intensive, life critical and human latency sensitive. The hardware component is estimated to hold the largest market size during the forecast period, owing to the large-scale deployment of hardware components for decentralising storage and computing operations, enabling comprehensive edge infrastructure deployment, and reducing network traffic. Organisations offer advanced edge computing hardware that either acts as an initial point of data source (edge devices) or a facilitator of the entire network (gateways and servers); or serves as a storage 20 INTELLIGENT INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com