Local businesses are being encouraged to properly maintain their local and regional edge computing infrastructure in order to improve efficiency and save energy.

During a recent interview with DigIT, Manuel Rodriques, sales director at Schneider Electric (Caribbean) — a digital transformation of energy management company — explained that “edge computing is when you have a regional environment [regional edge] for any part of your infrastructure, such as a data centre, that is centralised and is housing critical applications across multiple sites.”

Another component of the system, he said, is the local edge opportunity, “where each individual site is now connected to that central site”.

Rodriques noted that the concept came about some ten years ago to move data from the local to regional cloud to save on operations.

Edge computing is directly related to the Internet of Things (IoT) and experts have calculated that tens of billions of connected things will generate massive volumes of data from disparate sources.

Management consulting firm, McKinsey & Co estimates that the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) will create US$7.5 trillion in value by 2025.

Ideally, Rodriques said edge computing can solve latency challenges and allow organisations to take better advantage of the opportunities that leverage a cloud computing architecture. However, sometimes the workload generated from the transmission of bandwidth-intensive video causes congestion and latency the network.

He said, too that local edge is often left to the wayside and some businesses may not be “rightsizing” the right cooling environment, which could lead to disastrous results, adding that maintenance of the system is important.

“We at Schneider Electronic want to improve reliability, efficiency and save on energy consumption, and are focused on providing all the pieces of equipment for the infrastructure to facilitate efficient edge computing,” he said.

Gonzales noted that as a part of the company’s plan to expand its services to Jamaica and the Caribbean, several technicians have been trained to work through its local energy partners Jamaica Modern Power and Cooling Technology, and Massy Technologies.

Rodriques pointed out that hyper-growth and technological advancement in Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean region have propelled the company to find long-term solutions to maintain the upgrading of the infrastructure.

He emphasised that proper maintenance of systems, such as edge, can see companies saving up to 15 per cent in energy.

“It’s really about how we can right size to provide savings”.