A recent survey by Vertiv has suggested that the data centre landscape will transform over the next few years due to a growing shift to the edge.

In a survey of 156 global industry professionals with insight into their company’s edge computing strategies, roughly a third said they were planning or in the process of rolling out significant edge deployments.

On average, 21% of participants’ IT infrastructure was currently deployed at the edge – but by 2026, this was expected to increase to 27%. Similarly, this trajectory was echoed by the percentage of IT resources currently deployed in the public cloud, which participants expected to grow from today’s 19% to 25% by 2026.

A quarter of those questioned had already deployed purpose-built edge sites, with 41% operating legacy edge facilities, which had been specified based on the power requirements of the IT load. With today’s emerging use cases having more demanding requirements, survey participants recognised the challenges facing them when expanding their edge networks. When asked to prioritise these challenges, 85% put security in their top three, followed by availability at 69% and latency at 62%.

This survey follows Vertiv’s report, Edge Archetypes 2.0: Deployment-Ready Edge Infrastructure Models, which identified four edge infrastructure models to enable a semi-standardised approach to edge infrastructure deployment to help facilitate transition to edge.

“The next five years will reshape the data centre landscape, shifting more and more computing to the edge while buttressing the enterprise facilities at the core of modern hybrid networks,” said Martin Olsen, global vice president for edge strategy and transformation for Vertiv.

 “This survey makes clear the urgent demand for computing closer to the end-user. The future of computing is about speed and latency, and the only way to meet the need is to build out the edge of the network.”

The complete results of the survey are available to read here.