Edge Cloud: Google Cloud and Rakuten detail how organizations can drive innovation and growth on their own terms

Nearly 20 years ago, businesses that managed workloads within their own data centers began shifting towards centralized data centers and hyperscaler cloud environments. These facilities were managed by service providers offering flexible and scalable provisioning of computing, storage, networking resources. Today, the requirement to provide services with enhanced speed, lower latency and cost-efficiency is driving computing power to the edge to be closer to where data is being generated.

At Rakuten Optimism 2023, Partha Seetala, President of Cloud Business Unit, Rakuten Symphony, joined Vijay Tewari, Director of Product Management, Google Cloud Platform, in a session moderated by industry analyst Roy Chua, to discuss the industry’s transition to an edge cloud paradigm and how edge is rapidly becoming an enabler for enterprises that need to deliver exceptional experiences. Partha outlined the journey of the last two decades and critical use cases across the travel, retail, manufacturing and telecom sectors.

Highlights of the discussion:

• The cloud pervasively introduced the industry to the concept of automation and application engineering, leading to a fundamental shift in how applications are developed, deployed, provisioned and operated. 
• The philosophy of operating centralized cloud-based applications, in terms of the approach, economics and even the collaborative DevOps-enabled culture, would be now translated to edge cloud. 
• Edge cloud facilitates data processing in close proximity to the user, whether it's the near edge or the far edge, as determined by the specific needs of the business or application. This localization of processing simplifies a variety of operations, particularly those requiring swift actioning. By bringing computation resources closer to where data is generated, latency is minimized, and near-real-time decision-making becomes more feasible.
• This strategic positioning of edge cloud resources minimizes the back-and-forth data transfer between distant data centers and cloud, resulting in optimized network efficiency. As a result, businesses can offer prompt, responsive services while conserving bandwidth and overall system performance.
• The industry is still discovering the creative potential of the edge. Hence, it is important to select and invest in a platform that is flexible enough to support diverse and innovative use cases, and scale and grow as per business demands. There is an increasing need to reduce the total cost of ownership, enhance innovation and improve the economics of network management through automation.  

Watch the full interview below.

Eliminate risks and roll out to the edge with confidence

Google Distributed Cloud Edge (GDCE) is an optimized solution for enterprises planning to leverage the full potential of the Edge Cloud. GDCE supports enterprise applications that run on prem, extending the cloud footprint all the way to the edge. Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage (formerly Symcloud) for GDCE constitutes the industry’s leading Edge Cloud storage solution, which helps businesses in any industry eliminate risks and experience effortless, reliable edge storage deployments. Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage is custom built to be both “application-aware” and “edge friendly,” in terms of its ability to support as it relates to quick provisioning, automation and end-to-end lifecycle management.