While today’s enterprises are facing unprecedented challenges, CIOs know that there is a tremendous opportunity to reduce costs and protect their business and customers.

Edge computing—a distributed computing framework—allows enterprises to bring enterprise applications closer to data sources (such as IoT devices or local edge servers) and act on insights closer to where data is created. Edge computing also enables better data control and costs, faster insights and actions, and continuous operations.

Think about this from the perspective of a CIO in the automobile industry and the use case of connected cars. The company’s edge computing solution must provide continuous availability within the car’s device for the sake of driver safety and efficiency—whether it’s on a highway or an older country road. It’s key that the CIO can manage and make updates to those devices in near-real time and do so in a safe, simple, and cost-efficient manner.

No matter your industry or use case, you should realize certain benefits from your edge computing solution, including cost savings and the simplification of edge endpoint management.

But first, let’s explore why autonomous management plays a major role.

Learn why edge computing needs autonomous management.

Enterprises with edge environments need a new approach to deal with the issues of massive scale, variability, and rate of change. Management actions like deployment negotiation, agreement, execution, and on-going validation of workloads must be offloaded from the human administrator and onto autonomous management software.

This is achieved by asynchronous communication between software agents on edge endpoints and a management hub that constitutes the autonomous management software. The actions carried out are based on the administrator intent but without his or her intervention, even during new endpoint onboarding.

Dramatically reduce costs with remote and autonomous management

By implementing an autonomous lifecycle management approach, one administrator can manage deployments to thousands of endpoints, with management tasks carried out based on intent and with no intervention needed.

For example, IBM Edge Application Manager provides autonomous management that can help administrators significantly improve the administrator-to-managed endpoints ratio, as compared to traditional management approaches. You can scale your business operations for improved continuous availability across thousands of edge locations without incurring significant administrative costs.

Manage your endpoints in one place with the ability to deploy on any cloud

Many clients have already realized the benefits of decentralized deployments through their embrace of a multicloud approach to digital transformation. Edge endpoints run on containers and Red Hat® OpenShift®, giving you choice and flexibility to extend from any public or private cloud to any edge server or device. Manage your endpoints using any cloud with open source benefits.

Take the next steps with IBM

We’re ready to help your enterprise realize the benefits of edge computing. Get started by exploring the following resources:

• Web: IBM 5G and edge computing solutions
• Video: Intro to IBM Edge Application Manager
• Free trial-offer: IBM Edge Application Manager