Overview of Gartner The Edge Manifesto Report

The edge manifesto calls for the placement of content, compute and data center resources on the edge of the network, closer to concentrations of users. This augmentation of the traditional centralized data center model ensures a better user experience demanded by digital business.

We’ve begun the move to digital business, including rich content via mobile devices, where people, their devices and even unattended “things” become actors in transactions. To optimize the experience, Gartner believes the topology of networked data centers will push over the next five years from a centralized, mega data center approach, to one augmented by multiple, smaller, distributed sources and sinks of content and information, whether located in distributed, enterprise-owned data centers, hosting providers, colocation or the cloud.

The key findings of the report

• Gartner’s Nexus of Forces is driving the convergence and mutual reinforcement of mobile, social, cloud and information in support of consumerization and the democratization of IT, while raising user expectations, emphasizing content-rich data types, and creating increased volume of information and transactions.
• Digital business takes these elements and applies them to support new business models stemming from information, and places them as critical pieces of core business offerings, with an emphasis on timely and accurate delivery.
• Moving data centers’ processing and content delivery/collection closer to the sources and sinks of this information, including cloud onramps and offramps, offers significant benefits and spawns new business models. This is the essence of the “edge manifesto.”
• The use of smaller, distributed, connected data centers (perhaps space in colocation centers), closer to concentrations of users and generators of content (“pushing things to the edge”), will be required for these workloads. In many cases, these will augment, not replace, the more traditional large data center.

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