What today’s enterprises need: As with security, achieving performance is more difficult at the edge — but application performance in today’s digital climate is the way work gets done, so it’s a top priority. Increased distances from the cloud or data center make application performance suffer, and for some applications such as database-driven ERP, POS or Line-of-Business systems, the health of the business counts on high availability and always-on local performance. For some sites, it is not always possible to cost-justify high-quality MPLS links to the edge, and a new generation of SaaS and public-cloud based apps have also brought about a hybrid approach to business apps and networks.
Today’s enterprises must be able to achieve increased control over the performance of Internet-based apps if they are to play a key role in business being transacted. And with the increased use of IoT at the edge to capture and analyze data, enterprises must also have the ability to run some data analytics close to the point of capture in order to stay agile.
How yesterday’s technology falls short: As previously discussed, it is difficult to deliver high performance at the edge due to distance, unreliable connectivity and a lack remote IT staff or clear visibility to troubleshoot issues that may arise. So, for mission critical apps where a lacking of local performance can cost in reputation, revenue and competitive advantage, edge locations often become costly-to-maintain, power-consuming, mini-data centers.
This traditionally means a significant server, storage, backup, WAN Op and networking infrastructure footprint on site at the edge location, often cobbled together with many systems to maintain from multiple vendors without the luxury of expert data center staff and resources. This exacerbates the problems described above of agility, velocity and security.