As digital development grows in all industries – through cloud services that make digital operations more accessible and affordable; the rapid acceleration of IoT adoption driving business operations across verticals; and the accelerant of 5G creating new value in enterprise connectivity – the collaboration of telcos, IoT providers, and hyperscalers is becoming a more attractive approach.
The newest generation of cellular technology is going to play a major role in IoT innovation over the next decade. The GSMA estimates that by 2025, there will be 1.1 billion 5G connections1 and 5G will most likely cover a third of the world’s population.
Looking beyond the consumer application of 5G and into the business sector, 5G will prompt sweeping technological advancements due to its high speed, low latency, and high bandwidth. With a symbiotic, backward compatible design with 4G, growing pains for cellular technologies are not as large a concern as the transition from 2G/3G to 4G and beyond. A recent report estimated that 5G and IoT-enabled smart applications will represent a $1.7 billion global opportunity by 2025. These investments will be seen in a host of ways.
Enterprises are undergoing a rapid digital transformation. Many processes and procedures are turning to digital, whether it’s digitizing supply chains, adding robotics and automation to the manufacturing floor, or bringing augmented or virtual reality to corporate IT.
These migrations to digital processes are born of necessity to optimize and create efficiencies but they are also created through enablement in new technologies like cloud computing. Technology moves quickly and the need to adopt technologies quickly is crucial in ROI. Projects that implement IoT, for example, shouldn’t take massive amounts of time to complete because that detracts from the overall benefit of the solution.
The cloud enables organizations to quickly build and scale new technology projects because it eliminates the need for investment in physical hardware, servers, and data centers. This has been creating a boom in innovation due to the agility and scalability in a virtualized environment.
The cloud offers enormous benefits and is not going to be replaced by the latest technology trend of edge computing. But edge does provide key benefits. If computing is taking place within the cloud, the longer it is going to take to react. If the device can compute on the edge – whether that’s a gateway, server, or device – then the reaction time speeds closer to real-time. The high speed and low latency of 5G are going to create more opportunities for edge computing than was possible with 4G. Not only can edge computing create faster communications and actions, but it is also much more cost-effective, particularly in IoT ecosystems that deploy thousands of devices.
This technology, both in its speed and cost efficiency, is going to ramp up in coming years, backed by 5G. The IDC predicts that by 2023, more than 50 percent of new enterprise IT infrastructure will be at the edge, rather than in corporate data centers.
For many applications, the edge can be thought of as a supporting technology in addition to the cloud. Those areas that need greater speed and latency requirements can be defaulted to edge. This can help reduce the overall network traffic for better-performing applications and software for those that utilize the edge and those that utilize the cloud. It’s a purpose-built approach to computing.
The convergence of edge, the cloud, and IoT is an area that is quickly growing and one that ties together a wide ecosystem of IoT devices transforming business operations with the speed and scalability of the cloud and edge processes.
KORE, AWS, and Ericsson will present in a live webinar “IoT, Cloud, and Edge: Agility in the 5G Massive Data Era” on April 26 at 11 a.m. EDT. Industry experts will discuss 5G implications, how DevOps can create greater efficiencies, and how IoT ties in with the cloud and agility.
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