Executive Summary
In Vertiv’s What’s Your Edge survey, a group of professionals from all major regions of the world, working in diverse industries, report on their companies’ growth at the edge of the network, as well as the size and type of critical digital infrastructure they are deploying or planning to deploy to meet emerging edge computing use cases such as predictive maintenance, condition-based monitoring, and supply chain management, among others.
While survey results appear to support a steady edge evolution, there are still operational issues to be considered in order for organizations to effectively ensure edge of network availability during this proliferation.
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21%
27%
today;
in 2026
% of IT infrastructure that
is deployed at the edge
Percent of IT resources
deployed in the public cloud
Significant edge
deployments
Half of current
edge sites
Have power requirements between 2 and 20 kW
Renewable energy
Popular edge use case
Top priorities of
deploying edge sites
Popular edge use case
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% of IT infrastructure that
is deployed at the edge
A global survey of 156 industry professionals with insight into their company’s edge computing plans found that, on average,
21%
of participants’ IT infrastructure is deployed at the edge today.
By 2026, they expect
that to increase to
27%
by 2026
25%
to
19%
Percent of IT resources deployed in the public cloud
25%
Parallel to the growth in edge computing will be increased dependence on the cloud at the network core.
grow from the current 19% to 25% by 2026.
19%
The percent of IT resources deployed in the public cloud is expected to
to
by 2026.
are planning/
34%
have in progress
Significant edge
deployments
of participants operating legacy edge sites
41%
The survey exposed significant edge activity in the market today,
with
having already deployed new purpose-built edge sites.
25%
and
More than a third (34%) are planning for significant edge deployments or are in the process of significant edge deployments.
Current edge sites
Half of current edge sites consist of between one and four
IT equipment racks.
More than a quarter of sites (29%) were in the 5-20 rack range, and 13% had more than 20 racks.
IT racks
4
to
1
of sites
48%
Power requirements
48%
Edge power requirements aligned with the physical size of edge locations, with
having power requirements between 2 and 20 kilowatts (kW);
28%
between 21 and 200 kW;
between 201 and 400 kW;
6%
8%
over 400 kW.
are planning to use
40%
Sustainability
40%
Sustainability is playing a major role in new and planned edge deployments. More than three-quarters of sites (77%) are using or planning to use energy-efficient uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems. In addition,
are planning to use renewable energy;
water-efficient cooling;
31%
dynamic grid support technologies;
29%
cooling systems based on refrigerants with a low global warming potential (GWP).
19%
(39%)
Predictive
Maintenance
(34%)
Supply Chain Management
Security and
Availability
Popular edge
use cases
The most popular edge use cases identified by the survey as driving edge computing adoption are predictive maintenance (39%) and condition-based monitoring (36%). This is likely due to the broad applicability of this use case across all forms of manufacturing, as well as other industries dependent on mechanical systems.
Popular edge
use cases
Other popular use cases include:
34%
Supply chain management
real-time inventory management
31%
video streaming
21%
connected traffic
infrastructure
20%
Smart Grid
17%
Top priorities of
deploying edge sites
While security and availability were top priorities of participants deploying edge sites, the survey exposed some current design and operating practices that could reduce edge computing sites’ ability to achieve these objectives as the number of sites expands.
