Data management with FairCom EDGE reduces costs and latency

Managing data near IIoT devices improves quality and real-time decision making

The costly cloud

No one will argue against the greatness of the cloud. From reduced in-house infrastructure support to mobility, the cloud offers numerous benefits. Indeed, the cloud must continue to play its vital role in the IoT/IIoT disruption. However, the question executives are asking more and more of these days is: For all its greatness, must that also apply to its costs? 

It’s more than just dollars and cents

It is easy to add up the monetary value of cloud-related costs such as bandwidth and data transmission costs. For example, if you are moving 30 TB of data from some of the most popular clouds, you can expect to pay $2,400 to $2,600 per month. And in general, IDC predicts that global public cloud services and infrastructure spending will increase from $210 billion in 2019 to $370 billion in 2022.

But what is not as easily calculated is the negative impact of high latency, which could result in poor data quality, increased decision-making time and increased risk of system failure. It could also mean the difference in good and bad profit margins, functioning and non-functioning products, and in certain scenarios, life and death. 

The solution? A hybrid approach that utilizes the edge to support the cloud. According to Business Insider “… edge computing solutions are growing more central to IoT discussions and increasingly sophisticated as companies seek to reduce data transmission costs and lower latency.”

FairCom EDGE: The fastest way to fast with the lowest cost

One solution that can significantly reduce transmission costs and mitigate latency is the FairCom EDGE IoT Database, which allows management of data with a fully functioning data management system on or near the devices that collect it. Obviously, if there is no need to transmit data at all, or very far, transmission costs and latency will be dramatically reduced.

The cost advantages of managing data on the edge go beyond these two high-level benefits. Using FairCom EDGE in an IIoT infrastructure will create significant reductions in the time needed to make decisions. This can easily be done with FairCom EDGE due to the plug-ins that process data in real-time, enabling actionable decisions to occur quickly on the edge. In addition, built-in integrations in FairCom EDGE can automatically send commands. These built-in integrations include MQTT, PLC, OPC UA, REST and ANSI SQL. By integrating with devices, equipment and computers on the edge, valuable time is saved and high-cost risks avoided. A real-time decision-making process stops the chain of accompanying problems or, at least can minimize their effects.

A hybrid approach: FairCom EDGE completes the cloud

FairCom EDGE’s ability to store and forward data enables it to process data in real time on the edge while simultaneously and asynchronously replicating data to the cloud. A hybrid approach means there is no waiting for data to be transmitted to and from the cloud or other data centers and reduces potential points of failure within the edge. All the while harnessing the full power of the cloud, such as machine learning, advanced analytics, long-term data storage, etc.

FairCom EDGE has also been designed with the “low-code” principle, providing interfaces that require minimum to zero code writing. A good example is its integrated MQTT broker with a communication protocol developed by FairCom, which allows an application, or a gateway edge device, to interact with the database by simply exchanging messages. It can store, read and manipulate data directly from typical edge gateways, like industrial PCs, or even from machines themselves, whose PLCs can already talk MQTT. This empowers the operational team to create and control its own applications, without the requirement of having a full IT developer’s team creating a typical development project.

We are only scratching the surface of what can be accomplished by using FairCom EDGE to manage data in the IoT, IIoT and edge-computing environments. To learn more about the power of FairCom EDGE, click here.