As Standards Evolve, Edge Deployments Follow Business Cases

IT leaders have no shortage of priorities to balance as they position their organizations for resiliency and growth. And one of the hot spots for growth and transformation is the Edge.

Like all emerging technologies, edge computing is evolving right along with the standards that will someday set parameters and best practices for implementation. Until then, organizations are crowd-sourcing their approach, says Chris Smith, Vice President of Platform Applications with Lumen Technologies.  “It still requires thoughtful design and consulting to deploy modern applications in a distributed fashion,” Smith told IDG in Episode 2 of Lumen’s podcast series (listen below).

And like many emerging technologies, defining “The Edge” is a moving target. And that’s not a bad thing, says Smith. It all depends on the business need and use case.

“We’ll have customers come to us and really all they need is they need a data center where they can bring in the racks and they can bring in their gear and they needed to plug it into a network,” Smith says. “We have customers that really don’t want to be bothered with the capital outlay of buying bare metal and buying hardware because it’s more and more commodity. So they’re looking for the data center and the hardware layer and plugging that into a network. Then you’ll have customers that want us to deal with the virtualization and the operating systems. So it’s sort of a building block.”

Tune in to hear Smith discuss services and applications at the edge, how Secure Access Service Edge is playing out, and a look ahead to what’s in store at The Edge.