What-Are-Best-Practices-For-Edge-Computing

There are many factors driving the edge computing market some include, 5G, advances in artificial intelligence, and the processing of the every-growing data collected by the Internet of Things (IoT). With every new market emerges a list of best practices to help organizations navigate and succeed in this new space. The edge computing market is no exception. Here are 5 best practices that can be applied today.

Use Cases and Budget

Use cases generally drive everything in business and edge computing is no exception. While more use cases for edge computing are emerging every day, these will only provide you with a place to start. The combination of your organization’s needs, requirements, goals, objectives, and budget are unique.

While you don’t want to bite off more than you can chew with your first foray into edge computing you do need to extract significant value for the business. Taking the time here to get project clarity and strike a balance between effort, budget and results will tip the odds of success in your favor.

Ownership and Partners

Edge computing brings with it unique management challenges that can generally be bucketed into 4 categories.

Information Technology

First edge computing involves information technologies (IT), those people that manage the technologies for information processing - software, hardware, communications. At this point, we are all intimately familiar with their duties and responsibilities.

Communication Technologies

Second is communication technologies (CT), those people responsible for the equipment and programs used to process and communicate information, which may or may not be part of your IT group.

Operational Technologies

Third is operational technologies (OT), those people that monitor and manage the hardware and software at the endpoints that produce the data for the enterprise. OT is not new, it’s been around for decades. Think public infrastructure where teams monitor and control the valves on dams and aqueducts or manufacturing controlling robots on an assembly line.

What’s new here is the required cooperation and collaboration between these groups. No one group can own this project, because one group cannot speak to the requirements, or perform the duties, of the others. This organizational make-up is not just about managing edge computing resources but includes vision, long-term strategy, budget oversight and involvement with overall enterprise strategy.

Partners

Business partners are also emerging in the edge computing world. How many partners you have here will, of course, be dependent on your IT, CT and OT deployment needs now and in the future. Therefore business partners also need to be included in your overall edge computing organizational landscape.

Architecture and Design

The use case you create with drive the overall architecture and design of your edge computing landscape. While we are no stranger to this part of the process, once again edge computing brings with it a new twist, marrying the requirements of IT, CT and OT, the solutions to which may not already exist.

For example, consider the data path from intake at edge devices to its deposit into the data lake.

You have to establish the path of the edge devices to the data lake including location, installation and implementation needs.
How, what, and how much data is collected by the edge devices?
Which data is processed and analyzed at the edge location and how?
Which data is transmitted back to the data lake? And how?
Do you have to bandwidth for all data transmissions between connection points?

Then there are the questions of reliability, resiliency, security, sustainability, and scalability. Just from this short (and incomplete) list of questions, it is clear that every group needs to not only participate in this phase but accept responsibility and accountability of the overall edge computing landscape architecture in order for the project to have any hope of succeeding.

Service Level Agreements, Compliance, and Support

This area deserves a separate line item in terms of best practices because this is where reality in the business world lives. In today’s 24/7 world slow-time is not tolerated well and downtime is completely unacceptable.

In addition under mounting cyberattacks, extreme pressure and accountability are placed on organizations to safeguard information. Therefore, service-level objectives and compliance must be considered from the very beginning.

From a maintenance and sustainability standpoint, support of all kinds must be considered upfront. Support responsibilities for all installed hardware and software must be understood. Selections for hardware, software and business partners must consider current and long-term needs. While it is critical to support the stated use-case, you also need to ensure your edge computing landscape is simple enough to maintain and upgrade as the business grows and technologies change.

Security

As with all IoT, you need to protect against cyberattacks. A handful of security concerns in edge computing can, and may, be covered by your established enterprise security practices but these alone will not secure your edge computing landscape. Many IoT devices are essentially devoid of protection, some edge devices are in public spaces with data traveling over public networks.

You cannot just slap on a patch for every identified security issue or you will quickly have an unmanageable mess, and a landscape that is undoubtedly even less secure. When considering security for edge computing you need to not only look at every nook and cranny of your network to identify security issues, but also the overall end-to-end landscape. You need a systemic approach that looks at security from both physical and logical perspectives: location, access, hardware, software, data, all the connections between endpoints and how data is passed between each point.

At the end of the day, security for edge computing comes down to analyzing and managing risk.

There are many documented advantages to edge computing including lower latency, improved user experience, better performance, lower cost and depending on your point of view, improved security. Best practices in the area of edge computing are evolving as more enterprises and industries join the ranks. Regardless, the cooperation and collaboration between all involved groups is, and has always been, a foundational piece for any successful project.