How Industry 4.0 and Edge Computing is Empowering Cloud

Cloud Computing continues to help businesses transform operations with the help of resources stored in data centers worldwide, which helps improve the ability to scale business and reduce costs. On the other hand, Edge Computing brings the power of Cloud Computing close to users by processing at the edge nodes – which brings speed and efficiency to communication and adds privacy and reliability by keeping processing data at the Edge. This, in return, increases the responsiveness and throughput of applications and significantly outperforms the traditional cloud approach.

Zigron is proud to offer Cloud-native experts with a deep understanding and knowledge of network topology, network efficiency, device management, and more. With cloud-native network and distributed cloud computing expertise, our cloud experts have moved beyond traditional connectivity-service models and opened new doors to adjacent industries.

Industries are Leveraging the Edge

Companies understand how vital it is to use Edge computing and how its benefits can help companies become more competitive in their respective industries, i.e., retail, energy and utilities, and beyond.

Retail

Brick and mortar retailers are leveraging the benefits of edge computing in combination with IoT on several fronts, i.e., customer experience, augmented reality, touchless checkout, and store navigation. For example, cashier-less checkouts are set to continue growing. As per researchers, transactions using such innovative technologies will reach around 400 billion USD by 2025.

Manufacturing

Understanding the benefits of edge computing is leveraging the manufacturing industry to gain real-time insights from their factory floor. Sensors and 5G-enabled cameras provide factory workers with actionable intelligence that helps improve productivity by anticipating equipment performance issues and help prevent product defects and design inconsistencies while keeping up with quality and safety standards. These also help edge computing benefit from augmented, mixed, and virtual reality in health, safety, and monitoring.

Agriculture

Edge computing and 5G are making farming smarter than ever through improved crop monitoring and predictive maintenance of critical machinery by gathering data on equipment performance where 5G is available.

Automotive

The autonomous industry is heavily dependent on edge computing, i.e., providing traffic information to help reduce road congestion and improve safety by giving hazardous road construction warnings while helping improve the consumer experience through enhanced infotainment.

Energy 

The energy sector can harness the benefits of edge computing to help improve predictive maintenance by using data analysis at Edge, as it allows corrective actions to be taken without the centralized device. For example, edge computing helps enable real-time performance to proactively monitor and manage sensors and gateway devices needed to evaluate asset health and diagnostics for near-real-time performance to pave the way toward a predictive maintenance model.

Industry 4.0 and Edge Computing 

The industrial revolution revolves around adopting smart and autonomous devices in industrial space. This is evident as more businesses shift towards smarter devices and IoT solutions. One major component is edge computing, which allows the processing of data on embedded devices rather than on the cloud.

Security in the Era of Industry 4.0

As we adopt Industry 4.0, the manufacturing industry is becoming an appealing target for attackers. Attackers see the convergence as an opportunity to move laterally across a manufacturing network for their malicious activities by taking advantage of systems for industrial espionage, IP leakage, or even production sabotage. At Zigron, we always take a look at some of the factors and risks to physical and digital manufacturing components that can lead to instances of compromise and help you stay at bay from cyber threats.

How Edge Computing helps Businesses

There are several key benefits that companies recognize as they leverage the edge computing approach, as highlighted below:

1. Puts data closer to the devices than a centralized system, ensuring data is used in real-time application performance. In short, the closer the data, the faster it can be accessed.
2. Reduces the amount of data that must be processed, reducing latency and hence the costs. Companies spend almost 35 percent of their expenditures on cloud infrastructure, which can significantly overcome using Edge computing.
3. Improves privacy and security by managing sensitive information given to edge devices, i.e., a retail advertising system that generates targeted ads to users based on demographic and behavioral information gathered through the promotional event.

5G is key to Edge Computing

Regardless of industry, edge computing exploits faster wireless connections with the dawn of 5G. High speed is associated with placing essential functions closer to data to reduce latency. By not sending data back to a centralized location, Bandwidth requirements and costs are reduced. Another important benefit of edge computing is improved reliability. Ops and Data are distributed, and this decentralization helps make the network more resilient. Although having more endpoints increases the number of attack surfaces, isolation and groups of devices through techniques such as 5G network slicing provide robust security.

Conclusion 

By moving the apps closer to data at its source, edge computing companies are now delivering multiple business benefits, inclusive of faster insights, improved response times, and better BW performance. As of this, more and more business processing is moving out of the data centers to the edge. As per reports, by 2025, almost 75 percent of data will be processed at edge devices.

Zigron provides cloud and edge computing experts with time-tested skills and experience to help companies move from traditional cloud deployments. In addition, we empower companies with enhanced privacy and security. We guarantee high-performance cloud-native applications where we can innovate quickly as per companies’ vision while modernizing existing infrastructures. Likewise, our 5G and Edge computing experts complement each other in creating opportunities for companies to enhance digitalization, improve performance, and support data security, enabling continuous operations across industries.

Zigron is based out of Arlington, VA, USA, and has more than 150 engineers in Islamabad, Pakistan; and can be your perfect strategic outsourcing/offshoring long-term development partner for IoT platforms development and cloud engineering embedded engineering, edge computing, and AI/ML. Zigron can help you optimize your costs and increase your speed to success. If you are interested in exploring Zigron as your strategic long-term development partner, please email us at sales@zigron.com or contact us at +1-412-478-6588.

We look forward to working with you.