Innovating on the Edge

FountainBlue's March 24 VIP Roundtable was on the topic of 'Innovating on the Edge'. Our executives in attendance represented a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, industries, roles, and organizations, but they each shared informed and insightful thoughts on how organizations and leaders are innovating on the edge. Below is a summary of their thoughts and suggestions.

There's an increasing need to collect data 'on the edge', so that we can collect data and respond quickly while also ensuring that the data is transferred to the cloud for additional processing and applications. The challenge is to understand what data needs to be tracked, how reports and responses can be quickly generated, and what information can be further directed to the cloud for additional processing, storage, management, and functionality. 

Our executives emphasized many times the need to integrate security and privacy into edge computing solutions, and the challenge of providing these solutions when there are so many devices on the edge, when there is little access to power on the edge, and when the devices and solutions on the edge have a small form factor. 

Below is a summary of some opportunities ahead:

• The metaverse offers many opportunities to create models and simulations and what-if scenarios so that we can understand and anticipate what might happen on the edge to help inform us even before development and implementation.

• There continues to be huge opportunities around the transference of huge amounts of data - collecting, storing, managing, processing, tracking data from the edge efficiently and then efficiently creating actionable reports from the data with high accuracy and reliability and low latency.

• There will be customized solutions as no one size will fit all. With that said, providing modules which can be the foundation for a personalized solution.

• There's an opportunity to process huge volumes of data with devices on the edge, where there's less access to power, features, and functionality. 

• Edge devices can be used to optimize working conditions, like humidity in a manufacturing plant.

• Create baseline data for individual devices or vehicles and track only the variance to the baselines, thereby anonymizing the user while providing valuable insights. 

• No code and other robotics solutions are making an impact in industrial automation as informational technology converges with operational technology.

• Proactively understand new threat vectors for solutions on the edge - even if the threat has never previously occurred.

The opportunities are amazing to behold, but there are challenges to the full adoption and implementation of innovations on the edge, in addition to the scalability and security issues already mentioned.

• an infrastructure and ecosystem needs to be in place to help efficiently optimize solutions on the edge

• applications which take volumes of data, generated real-time, and inserted into an app with intuitive workflow

• integrating existing, complex and outdated legacy solutions into cloud and edge solutions can make an organization more responsive, more efficient, more scalable 

We also talked about the need for humans to customize the integration between the solutions on the cloud and on the edge. It takes a human to strategize what needs to be done, how cloud solutions can work with edge solutions to proactively data policies and practices and facilitate innovating on the edge.