In the world of IT, enterprises are continuously adopting for the sake of innovation in terms of data transfer and collaboration. IoT has been one of the cornerstones of this adoption and it is spreading rapidly across various verticals despite security concerns. However, the amount of data that enterprises have to process while IoT is in operation is exploding everyday and the gravity of it has forced everyone to think about public cloud’s feasibility in the future.
What has IoT inflicted on the IT?
IoT and IT have love-hate relationship most of the time because of the amount of service that IoT gives and the level of security that IT needs to house IoT. However, there has been more impact from the IoT front than ever because IoT has inflicted changes of data patterns. So much so, Amazon had to release a product called Snowball Edge that gives power back to cloud by pushing data back from edges of networks. 
Snowball Edge came out as a surprise, but many people consider it to be a trendsetter in cloud business in the time to come. In fact, some of them have argued that public cloud’s nemesis is right here, and its name is IoT. Their argument is simple: so many sensors and so much data will simply crash public cloud some day by slowly decelerating the process. It is because of the outdated mode of data processing in public cloud where data is always assumed to be at the data centre. With IoT, data resides at periphery, making public cloud a difficult business.
In fact, IoT helps the public cloud providers, but customers are surprisingly at disadvantage. To curb that issue, Amazon has come forward to provide an array of avenues that will take any kind of data inside its belly. IoT spreads data centers across the network so that every single sensor-heavy device does not have to fall back on data centre every time for command. It is where edge computing has edged others out by ensuring that data is collected at edge and distributed to the peripheral, smaller data centres that resides right at the heart of the device, if possible.
The heart of edge computing
By shifting computing to remote sites, edge computing surely allows data to do much more than simple decision making. If the data needs to be analyzed closer to the source and then fed back again to the source for further consumption, which ensures that you need small data centres everywhere around the network. This only brings us back to all the problems that public cloud was set out to solve. Ever since cloud entered the fray, companies were trying to build consolidated data centres. But, as the reality appears to be right now distributed centres may well be the future.
In short, enterprises must head towards more decentralization with people trying to form local nodes of data transfer. Such micro data centres being the necessity of the hour, Snowball edge may well be the prototype for the future endeavours of AWS. That day is not far when hardware kits will also compliment this vision which will help IoT realizing its finest possibilities.
In fact, enterprises will focus towards IoT-driven investments which will see a series of acquisitions as well as developments from the tech giants. Some of them are already alerted by Amazon’s initiative and hence, are looking to catch up with them as soon as possible. Cisco is one such name who is trying to reposition themselves in the IoT nexus, which only goes to show that battle lines are drawn for IT enterprises.
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