Business and tech leaders collaborate to exploit the edge

Business and technology leaders are finally coming together not just to understand the new edge computing ecosystem, but to make more predictable, data-informed business decisions.

A new report from AT&T Cybersecurity finds that collaboration among leaders, as well as external partners in the ecosystem, will be critical for the edge journey ahead. But while the report finds organization's silos are beginning to erode and converge, more progress needs to be made.

More than half of survey respondents (56 percent) consider themselves to be in partial implementation of edge computing. For edge projects, 52 percent say they work with in-house resources plus a systems integration partner, and 63 percent work with in-house resources alongside a consultant.

While in-house resources are the top group responsible for edge project management like strategy, planning, integration and adoption, the report suggests this is unsustainable long-term. The study recommends a more collaborative approach using a partner ecosystem.

Industrial IoT/OT is the leading edge type of edge use at 65.4 percent, followed by IaaS/PaaS/SaaS cloud datacenter on 60.4 percent.

In last year's study a third of respondents expected to spend six to 10 percent and half expected to spend 11 to 20 percent of their budget on security. This year the study shows that security is now 22 percent of overall project budgets, equally distributed with strategy, indicating that security has become integral to deploying the edge rather than just an afterthought.

On-premises private cellular 5G is the leading edge network connectivity technology, used by 77.1 percent of respondents. Personal computers are the leading endpoint type (48.1 percent), followed closely by mobile devices (47.8 percent).

You can read more and get the full report on the AT&T blog.

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