The Vital Role of Edge Computing for IoT: 2017 Update

Wikibon confirms our previous conclusions that Edge computing will be a vital component of IoT, and the cost benefits and business benefits of using a Hybrid IoT Model will increase in time for most IoT environments. This research looks at some classes of IoT where that there will be greater use of centralized cloud, but still concludes that for almost all IoT cases some Edge pre-processing and data reduction will reduce the overall cost of IoT. In most IoT cases, moving the processing to the data will result in significantly greater function and lower costs, with the requirement for more complex distributed database, time-series database, software.

Enterprise executives with responsibility for implementing a long-term strategy for IoT should ensure that the architecture they adopt is a full IoT hybrid cloud solution, capable of managing, storing, processing, protecting and deleting 95% of data at the Edge today, and about 99% of data at the Edge by the end of the strategic project.