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Bernard Marr
This article is more than 3 years old.


Cloud computing refers to the ability to store data and retrieve it from off-site locations. It’s how your smart phone got so smart; phones don’t have enough built-in storage to maintain all the information they need for all their apps and functions, so they’re constantly transmitting and receiving data in order to provide you with the services you want.

The problem with cloud computing — as anyone with a slow data connection will tell you — is bandwidth. According to the World Economic Forum, the U.S. ranks 35th in the world for bandwidth per user, which is a big problem if you’re trying to transmit data wirelessly.

And as the Internet of Things continues to expand, with more and more physical objects connecting wirelessly to transmit and receive data, the problem is only going to increase.

Enter fog computing.


In our modern, western world, we exist with a huge amount of computing power around us all the time.  How many devices do you have at home at any given time?  A phone for every member of the family, a tablet or two, and probably a laptop in addition?

What if the laptop could download software updates and then share them with the phones and tablets? Instead of using precious (and slow) bandwidth for each device to individually download the updates from the cloud, they could utilize the computing power all around us and communicate internally.

That is fog computing.

Data is not the issue; we have more of it than we can analyze or utilize already, and we’re gathering more and more every day. The problem is going to be storing and accessing the data when we want it in a convenient fashion.

Fog computing allows for data to be processed and accessed more rapidly, accessed more efficiently, and processed and accessed more reliably from the most logical location, which reduces the risk of data latency.

Cisco Systems, which coined the term “fog computing,” and IBM (which prefers the term edge computing), both have ongoing initiatives to push computing back out to the edge of the networks, to the devices, routers and sensors where the Internet ends and the real world begins, blanketing our world with a fog of devices with the computing power to handle much of the data and processing we request of them on their own.

Any business relying on storing its data in someone else's data center would be wise to consider this new trend, and analyze how their business might be affected in the future by lack of bandwidth to access it.  It seems prudent then to consider how we might bring at least some of our data back down to earth until the US and other western nations have the wired and wireless Internet speeds we deserve.

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