Text by: Pauline Loygue – Chief Marketing Officer – Green Communications
WorkingAge intends to improve the health and well-being of people at work using Internet of Thinks (IoT). But most IoT solutions available on the market use the same centralized architecture where local IoT data are all sent and stored in large datacentres to be used locally. Thus, all smart things who wish to communicate with their immediate neighbour users, for informing on heart health, surrounding noise level or air quality, must use a remote cloud as an intermediary.
Such centralized architecture is raising concerns. Signals travelling through the entire Internet network, often across the world, results in network saturation, connection delays, higher and costly use of energy resources. Large datacentres centralizing most world’s data have a considerable carbon footprint. They become strategic target for hackers and a marketplace for trading people’s data.
A sustainable approach to solve this problem is to decentralize the cloud and bring it closer to end user and devices using Edge Computing techniques. Edge Computing is a paradigm that brings computation and storage next to the data source. An Edge Cloud is the federation of multiple edge computing devices for providing companies and institutions with the equivalent of a cloud distributed next to end users and devices.
Using an Edge Cloud in the WorkingAge project ensures local data remains local. Even when deployed over multiple locations, the WAOW Tool sends data from one edge to another directly, without any intermediary cloud. Thus, ensuring people and enterprise’s data privacy and sovereignty while providing better speed, security, and resiliency of critical IoT applications.
