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By | March 12, 2021

State of the Edge 2021 Report

Written by Jacob Smith, State of the Edge Co-Chair and VP Bare Metal Strategy at Equinix Metal

On Wednesday, LF Edge published their 2021 edition of the State of the Edge Report.  As a co-chair and researcher for the report, I want to share insight into how this year’s report was created. In development, we focused on three key questions to ensure the report covered essential subject matter:

  • What’s new in edge computing since last year?
  • What are the challenges and opportunities facing the ecosystem?
  • How can we help?

Designed to be “vendor neutral” and to shy away from any bias, we had multiple authors contribute content and utilized an independent editor to balance the report to better serve the edge computing community. Several experts weighed in on what they were paying attention to in the edge space and identified four major stand-out points:

  • Critical infrastructure (data centers)
  • Hardware and silicon
  • Software as a whole
  • Networks and networking

It’s abundantly clear there is growth in edge computing. Over the last year, COVID-19 accelerated nearly every facet of digital transformation, and this factored into the growth of the edge computing space. But, it also might just be a long overdue increase in digital innovation and transformation.

We will continue to discover more about the edge and how to use it to optimize the computing ecosystem. For now, our attention is focused on how diverse the edge is and all of the solutions that are waiting to be discovered.

Summarized from Equinix Metal’s The State of Your Edge. Read the full story here. Download the report here.