Why Edge and why low-latency edge?
During the journey of the 4th industrial revolution, companies thrive on their ability to differentiate themselves in the marketplace by efficiently and securely connecting their employees, customers, partners, and suppliers, around the world.
Data-driven organizations can innovate faster and optimize their applications to deliver exceptional user experiences. Thus, companies of all sizes are now transforming to become a digital business with core capabilities to acquire, analyze, and act upon data to ensure they can stay ahead of their competition.
High-performing applications are the key to business growth. As the physical and digital world intersect through AI, IoT, Robotics, etc., moving workloads to the “edge” is becoming an important focus for enterprises. In our recent research, 90% of IT leaders also agree that edge compute is the best environment for application that are especially latency sensitive.
What is Edge?
Edge computing is one of the fastest-growing enterprise technologies. It’s an architecture that brings enterprise applications closer to data sources. This proximity to data at its source can increase application performance, yielding real-time market insights. This helps to transform operations and products, speeding up innovation while accelerating the delivery of products, services, and applications back to the market.
To summarize, the promise of edge is the ability to decentralize and distribute compute closer to the source, at the “edge” of the network. The result is much faster computational speed than cloud services can offer when factoring round-trip latencies.
How edge drives better customer experiences
Take retail for example. To keep pace with the competition, most retailers are making significant investments to ensure the performance, reliability, and security of their online storefronts. In addition, the pandemic even makes retailers think more on how to meet a hybrid demand of increasing online shoppers and the evolving behaviors of in-store shoppers.
With edge compute solutions, retailers can integrate their online, offline, and back-office environment with the goal of creating a truly immersive and personalized omnichannel experience that bridges digital and in-person sales. Innovations such as AR (Augmented Reality) fitting rooms, self-service kiosks, and real-time pricing comparisons, can provide a more seamless buyers’ experiences when deploy on edge.
As for gaming, speed is key in providing flawless experiences, where lag, stutter, failed downloads, and video buffering issues will detract players from the immersive play that they expect from games. The answer to this is simple – reduced latency. Gaming companies are using CDN plus low-latency edge to drive high quality and low latency gamer experience.
Time to get to the edge
To deliver next-gen applications and more differentiated customer experiences, companies will require a new ecosystem of advanced technologies. To meet this demand, the Lumen Platform was built to deliver the scale, speed, security, and intelligence that cloud edge applications require while helping to lower the total cost of ownership.
As part of our Edge Computing portfolio, the launch of Lumen’s Application Delivery Solutions aims to deliver, secure, and optimize applications seamlessly with a global programmable edge and containerized solution ecosystem. Partnering with industry-leaders such as Varnish cache, Docker, etc. to support customers in deploying & scaling at the edge.
By working with leading security solution providers such as ThreatX and PerimeterX, we’re able to enable customize security for customer across industries and of any size.
With recent edge PoPs newly added to our global footprint including Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney and Singapore, we’re able to offer an edge platform integrated with other Lumen network-enabled products to help customers run applications closer to their users or audiences for high performance and low latency.
Visit our website for more details.
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