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How edge data centers can help you to keep pace with the digital transformation

Nxtra by Airtel | January 05, 2022

As the future move towards contactless services, get insights onto the role of edge data centers and a resilient and reliable network for businesses to meet new-age customer expectations.

Every day, we use machines to take numerous decisions on the go. Think of the GPS in our cars. It guides us to our respective destinations in real time. And, if we take a detour from the recommended route, it immediately adjusts and tells us an alternative route. Similarly, the automated surveillance cameras in high-security premises detect anomalies and impose access restrictions or raise an alarm instantly. The effectiveness of autonomous vehicles and drone-based delivery systems, both of which are seeing aggressive R&D, depends on their capability to take real-time decisions.

On the other hand, virtual conferences, online classes, tele-healthcare, OTT media services, connected home appliances, and digital personal assistants have become an integral part of our daily lives. All these modern technologies make our lives easier and enable us to get the work done in almost real time. One thing that is common among these technology-enabled services is faster response and processing of data. To enable these real-time service-based product platforms, the distance between the information origin and the processing hubs plays a vital role and must be minimum.

Decentralising from the core to the ‘edge’

Traditional architecture with a DC and DR scenarios utilise scalable, secure and far-off data centers that housed IT infrastructure along with storing and processing of data. However, for any real-time service, the use of edge-based solution, services and applications is inevitable to bring out the desired performance. The proliferation of automation and IoT and the exponentially increasing number of data-intensive applications demands extremely low latency to be able to bring usability for the end users. Such low latency can be achieved only if the data is processed closer to the source — at the edge.&nbsp

With the future moving towards contactless services, edge data centers are imperative for businesses to meet their new-age customer expectations. Most product and service companies are trying to create this differentiation by embedding edge-based solutions in their workflows.

What’s the “edge” in it?

Latency will play a key role in the services enabled to be consumed by an increasingly dispersed global user base. Alongside performance, other benefits that can be drawn from edge-based solutions are: 

Greater reliability and availability

With a decentralized topology, an incident at one site does not affect all. Latest vulnerable DDoS attacks on digital properties can be mitigated in a better manner, avoiding downtime or affecting services. Physical site-related issues do not impact the other nodes, and thus, the reliability and availability of services can be ensured.

Higher flexibility and scalability

In a distributed architecture, the reach, presence and horizontal scalability of data centers can be maximised with ease. IoT-based applications or digital netizen services can be scaled to meet the volume and service level with the use of edge. It also provides the flexibility to choose from the best options of edge to further distribute the workloads. 

Cost optimisation

Edge-based solutions allow enterprises to process data rapidly at the “edge” instead of taking a long haul back and forth to reach the centralised data center hub. This reduces the cost associated with long-distance networks. Also, most of the edge sites are in tier II and tier III cities, which have lower space rentals than metropolitan cities hosting core sites. This makes hosting large storage and compute relatively economical.  

Give your business a competitive edge

Going forward, leveraging edge data centers, along with a resilient and reliable network, will be imperative for organisations to deliver a superior customer experience. For efficient and optimum performance, you need technology partners that offer the whole bouquet of services – hyper-scale parks, wide edge data center footprint and dense network to integrate everything.

Nxtra by Airtel, a subsidiary of Bharti Airtel Limited, offers largest network of secure, scalable, and sustainable data centers in India to leading enterprises, hyperscalers, start-ups, SMEs and governments.

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