CTO Straight Talk - Issue 4 - 14

Enforcement of privacy policies. As the
ﬁrst point where data from IoT sensors
meets the data owner's infrastructure,
Tier 2 is the ideal place to enforce the
data owner's privacy policies, instead
of releasing raw data into the cloud and
hoping it remains secure until it reaches
the cloud provider's data center. For
example, a healthcare company could
scan all data for personally identiﬁable
information, or PII, as soon as it enters
the micro data center, then mask or
encrypt that data in compliance with all
relevant data privacy regulations.

LIVING ON THE EDGE
So, who are the early adopters of edge
computing? Where does the technology
have immediate potential?
Much of the current pursuit of edge
computing is taking place in the multibillion-dollar gaming industry, where
a product or an entire company can
stand or fall on the quality of the realtime user experience. Even on today's
most powerful smartphones, a high-end
mobile gaming experience requires most
of the compute to happen in the cloud.

Masking cloud outages. In the case of

Take the case of Pokémon Go,

a cloud service becoming unavailable,

the augmented reality game for

a fallback service on a nearby micro

smartphones. Players look at the real

data center can serve as a short-term

world through their phones, which

stopgap. This redundancy is critical not

broadcast their location wirelessly to

just as temporary protection against

the game's servers. Different Pokémon

cyberattacks, but in areas like military

characters then appear overlaid on

operations or disaster recovery, where

the screen image, changing size and

networking infrastructure is damaged

angle depending on how the player

or weak. For example, after a major

approaches them. When multiple people

earthquake, infrastructure is likely to

are looking at the same Pokémon

be unrecognizable, maps useless, and

character, it takes a lot of compute

connection to the broader Internet

power to make sure each of their phones

impossible. However, people in the area

displays the character from the right

could use their smartphones to take
pictures of the area and transmit them
to a local micro data center containing
software able to stitch photos together
into maps and topographical overlays.
The resulting images would evolve and
change in real time to make rescue
efforts faster and more effective.

14

A car going 60 mph travels
100 yards in 4 seconds. If your
onboard telemetry system
needs 3 seconds to tell you
that something's coming at
you, your life's at risk.

2012

2013

Cisco introduces the term " fog computing " to
describe the dispersed cloud infrastructures
needed to process big data and IoT data for
real-time low-latency applications.

A two-page internal report at the Paciﬁc
Northwest National Laboratory uses the
term " edge computing " for the ﬁrst time.
CTO Straight Talk - Issue 4

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of CTO Straight Talk - Issue 4
