What is Edge Computing?

As the number of users accessing the internet grows, more and more users use cloud computing for computation. Edge computing tries to aid users by implementing most of these functions on a user device or edge server. This policy ensures low delays and lesser bandwidth use as each data packet has to travel a shorter distance.

Edge computing is advantageous to process data from IoT devices, which send streams of continuous raw data that need to be stored. Small computations can be done at the edge node to ensure that only valuable data gets stored and processed at the cloud server, therefore saving resources. Edge nodes can be used to run computations that enable the IoT device to carry out quick action responses that previously required travel to the cloud server.

Benefits

• Since edge nodes are close to the end-user, they decrease the overall latency and can, therefore, be used to carry out time-sensitive tasks.
• Since only the most critical information is relayed back to the cloud server, this saves bandwidth and costs for the end-users and cloud providers.
• If most of the users are trying to access resources from a server, these resources can be brought to the edge node. Therefore, the users will only need to access the data from the edge nodes, and the traffic on the cloud servers will be reduced.
• Edge node can be configured to provide additional functionalities such as sorting extensive data, applying machine learning, and other resource-intensive tasks, therefore favoring the users.
• Edge nodes can be used to provide increased security. Rather than storing encryption and other user-specific data on clouds, they can be stored on edge nodes, which reduce​ the burden on the server without compromising the security of users.

Drawbacks

• This increases the attack vectors- the area that hackers can utilize to carry out attacks and find vulnerabilities.
• The edge nodes (e.g., IoT devices) become expensive as they need to contain a much more complex architecture to carry out the processing.
• The cloud companies will have greater access to user data and can, therefore, build a better profile about the users.
• Edge nodes, such as IoT devices, can be remotely updated by companies without users having​ any idea what the additional functionalities are.