Challenges and opportunities for edge cloud architectures

Distributed "edge" clouds provide the performance and security attributes to fill the cloud gap. The talk will cover the challenges and opportunities in bringing cloud to the comms infrastructure. "Edge Cloud" architectures are emerging as an area of increased interest and development. Unlike the binary choices of private cloud and hyperscale cloud of today, these distributed cloud and data center architectures enable new use cases that have impact now and set the stage for forthcoming technologies such as 5G, AR/VR and AI. Edge deployments bring compute and storage closer to the customer, allowing: (1) execution of low latency workloads (i.e: storage gateway, IoT or AR) while also increasing the throughput thanks to the compute distribution; (2) enhanced TCO thanks to the ability to reduce long haul traffic to more remote data centers (i.e: CDN); and (3) the ability to retain data in local or regional basis-an area of increasing regulatory importance.