CTO Straight Talk - Issue 4 - 63

Enabling delivery of vital goods to remote

a public cloud. Micro data centers could do

locations. Drones have reportedly been used

this in locations close enough to the chain's

to enforce quarantine restrictions in Spain

stores to offer low-latency connections but

and, using thermal imaging technology,

without the need to run expensive servers in

detect from the air people with a fever in

each location.

China. But they may be of greatest use during
a pandemic in quickly getting medication

Making WFH W(Productively)FH. One of the

or other supplies to remote or dangerously

high-proﬁle byproducts of the coronavirus

Position
infected areas. One stumbling block is the

pandemic has been remote work - the

Chief Technology Officer /
inability to accurately guide a drone beyond
Head of Corporate Function
the pilot's line of sight. A network of micro
Technology, Innovation &
data centers would provide the constant
Sustainability

shift from employees working in an office

that would enable a remote pilot to precisely
Company

recedes. But among the numerous challenges

connectivity and real-time processing of data

to working from home. And WFH, as this
phenomenon is known, seems likely to
remain widespread, even after the pandemic

direct a drone to a distant destination.
Thyssenkrupp

in making remote work productive work

Works
from
Protecting
medical networks from

remote devices and data-heavy apps put on

Essen,
Germany
cyberattacks.
In recent years, hospital

a network. For example, facial recognition

systems - including Britain's entire National

Professional
Background
Health Service - have been conspicuous

For the past ﬁve years, Dr.
victims of cyberattacks, which could be
Achatz has been the CTO of
disastrous during a pandemic. Micro data
Thyssenkrupp, focusing on
centers on the edge, which would allow
technology, innovation and
medical data to be processed and stored
sustainability. Before that, he
locally, without the need to connect to the
spent more than 30 years at
Internet, could provide an extra layer of
Siemens. In his last ten years at
protection against such attacks.
Siemens, he served ﬁrst as head
of
softwaresocial
and distancing.
engineering
Monitoring
Edge
and
then
as
head
of
corporate
computing's ability to process large amounts
research
and technologies.
of data in near-real
time could be married

with computer vision technology to help
Education

maintain social distancing in, for example, a

Dr.-Ing. (doctorate), Engineering
retail setting. Cameras could automatically
and Automation, Munich
detect, across all the stores in a big-box retail
Technical University; Dipl.chain, places where people were crowding
Ing. (undergraduate degree),
too closely together. But processing the
Friederich Alexander University,
large amount of data generated by such
Erlangen-Nürnberg.
cameras and immediately sending an alert

is the demand that countless additional

software requires that an algorithm be run
through cloud-based services.
Edge computing technology would allow
a local edge server to run the algorithm
much more quickly, improving the network
performance for remote workers.

***
Clearly, these examples represent a
narrow slice of the ways in which edge
computing can beneﬁt business and society.
The ability to deliver nearly real-time
analysis of IoT data opens up a wide range of
opportunities, from increased productivity to
entirely new business models.
But in their variety, these examples of how
edge computing could ameliorate the
scourge of a pandemic suggest the
scope of that potential.

to a particular store would require signiﬁcant
computing power nearer than the servers of

63
CTO Straight Talk - Issue 4

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