Think for a second about where these words come from. Stored in a file somewhere on a server and piped to your device as quickly and efficiently as possible.
In a traditional cloud environment, this will be the data centre closest to you (probably). And that will likely be a large farm of servers in a purpose-built warehouse as close as viably possible to population density.
But there aren’t thousands of these. For most hosting and infrastructure companies there aren’t even hundreds. Yet there are millions of people demanding their data – and that means billions of miles travelled to send information between servers and browsers on devices the world over.
What if we reduced these distances? What if we could have millions of smaller ‘data centres’ all around us rather than centralised large facilities? The answer would be a faster, cheaper and greener way to distribute and access digital services.
This is how Edge works. It doesn’t require farms of servers. It makes use of millions of devices already in our homes and offices to disseminate data storage among all of us – lacing together laptops, desktop PCs, games consoles or any device with spare capacity to make the global internet more local for all of us.
Web pages load faster. Files download more quickly. Videos are watched more seamlessly. Less energy is consumed in both storage and consumption of services too, meaning Edge makes your carbon footprint smaller.
It’s why we call Edge ‘future cloud’. Anyone can be part of this by contributing to the network – and if your business runs digital services, talk to us about how providing capacity to Edge Network can be offset against your infrastructure bills.
Knowledge
Last Updated:
April 2021