Technology is always changing, but know what’s around the corner and what could revolutionise the next decade can help you take meaningful action.
Here are two tech trends to keep an eye on for the New Year, and for a few years to come.
Edge routing and cloud computing changes
Cloud computing is already old news. Even if you ignore the old mass storage capabilities and digital lockers that came before it, the concept of running apps and collaborating across networked resources–a cloud of many devices, connections, and resources–is the normal way of business. It’s also slow.
Cloud computing isn’t much different from that. As people create new ways to work with the cloud, apps need to grab resources faster. Instead of travelling across copper, gold, or platinum contacts or light, many cloud systems cross mixed connections of various speeds.
If your cloud app or automated cloud tasks hit a networking hiccup–a drop in speed or congestion that an internal computer or server system doesn’t often deal with–your apps may crash or generate bad data.
Edge routing is a growing solution to that problem. It’s a step back in cloud computing while helping cloud computing, allowing high priority cloud tasks to happen on powerful servers on the edge of a cloud system.
The biggest tasks that can’t handle delays are sent to stronger servers at the edge of the cloud network–the first place you see in the cloud. Anything that can tolerate network delay (lag) will go deeper inside–past the edge and towards the core–of the cloud.
Extended reality
First was Virtual Reality, where people wore headsets or connected to looking-devices to see 3D worlds that they could interact with.
Next came Augmented Reality, with games such as Ingress, Pokemon Go, and various medical devices that could overlay maps and documents for medical procedures and consultations.
As both VR and AR come together with new games such as Star Citizen and even better medical information delivery, the Extended Reality term has come. XR is a catch-all term for various VR, AR, and mixed reality (MR) concepts.
It’s about being able to pick out specific points in the real world and getting more information. Not just knowing what a sign says in the distance, but being able to see data on the colour, construction, and other deeper details.
If the data can be documented, it can be delivered to VR and tagged. With automation and artificial intelligence, that data can be tagged on-demand or sent to a manual professional who can handle the request later.
Source: e27
