The ability of organisations to realise business value from data increasingly depends on their capacity to collect, process, store and analyse it at the Edge, new research from Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, suggests.
Based on a global study of 2,400 IT decision-makers (ITDMs), 70% in Asia-Pacific markets — including Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Singapore and South Korea — are already actively using Edge technologies to deliver new outcomes, with 6% planning to do so in the next year.
However, 84% recognise the urgency around the need to implement integrated systems to handle data at the Edge.
Globally, 78% of ITDMs in production deployment with Edge technologies said they were in a position to use this data to improve business decisions or processes. That compares with just 42% of ITDMs in the APAC region who are only at the pilot stage and 31% who are planning pilots in the next year.
“Despite the economic brunt of COVID-19, the global interconnection bandwidth sees a 47% CAGR by 2023, with the APAC region leading the adoption of private connectivity services,” said Justin Chiah, senior director pf South East Asia, Taiwan and Hong Kong/Macau at Aruba.
Chiah said this elevated appetite for Edge connectivity services, enabled by increasingly prevalent IoT infrastructure, continues to transform the new hybrid workplace model as businesses move workloads to the Edge.
Survey findings also show that firms are drowning in data, and yet they see the Edge as a solution. Across APAC, 37% of ITDMs said “there is too much data for our systems to handle” and 30% said that “we cannot process the data quickly enough to take action.”
Also, boosting efficiency and creating new experiences ranked as the top (54% of respondents) benefit from capturing and analysing data at the Edge.
Still, concerns over cost, skills and security abound as 34% of ITDMs in APAC pointed to a lack of expertise, skill or understanding with regard to Edge technologies, as well as difficulty integrating with legacy technologies as top concerns.
Notably, 95% think they are missing at least some skills needed to help their organisation unlock the value of data.
