Edge computing has become one of the essential elements in efforts to remove the damaging digital divide between the South of England, the Midlands and North.
Studies continue to show how the divide means the Midlands and North are behind their southern neighbours in productivity, skills, investment and access to the major cloud vendors data centres and networks of specialist partners.
The digital divide is so worrying that “levelling up digital prosperity” is one of the ten priorities of the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS). In September 2021, the department published detailed research on the topic, entitled Assessing the UK’s Regional Ecosystems. Figures in the report show that whereas 8.4 percent of jobs in London, and 5.7 percent in the South East are in the digital sector, the corresponding figures for the Midlands are much lower. Just 2.4% of jobs in the East Midlands are in the digital sector and only 2.6 percent in the West Midlands.
There are many reasons to be digitally cheerful. The department’s report found digital growth to have been good in Nottingham and Leicester, even if the East Midlands fared poorly at creating digital jobs before Covid. The region also has one of the highest three-year survival rates for digital firms (63%). The West Midlands fares less well on this score and has the highest regional rate of employers saying they find digital skills difficult to obtain. But it did register a high rate of digital sector growth.
Location matters if you are a digital organisation
Location is a problem, however. Research by Pulsant among IT decision-makers and business leaders in the UK found a consistent pattern of disadvantage among businesses in the Midlands.
Nearly six-in-ten organisations (58 percent) in the Midlands believe their location is a barrier to attracting talent, compared with 51 percent in the South. Exactly six-in-ten Midlands-based IT decision-makers (60%) said their location causes them problems with connectivity, compared with 44 percent in the South. Even more in the Midlands (64 percent) thought their difficulties with the reliability of their IT infrastructure are down to their location.
Businesses in the Midlands are no less ambitious and recognise they must undergo digital transformation to compete and innovate. More than two-thirds of IT decision-makers (68 percent) in the region rated digital transformation as “very important”.
The role of 5G and the development of edge computing
As many problems as there are with location outside the charmed Southmost are set to dissolve with the roll-out of edge computing. Edge computing has many potential configurations, but essentially, it enables organisations to process and analyse data closer to their location, through high-speed, high-bandwidth connectivity. The creation of 5G networks enables this, linking businesses using data-hungry applications or millions of sensors and devices to computing in regional data centres. These in turn have full connectivity to public cloud hubs.
Edge data centres sit between the on-ramp to public clould and network-to-network interfaces, processing data with the sub-five-millisecond latency that analytics and AI-driven applications demand. But for data that needs to be processed by the hyperscalers in the South, they provide the necessary, resilient, and high-speed fibre connectivity.
The edge platform will embrace the Midlands
A purpose-built edge platform that covers the UK will have the ability to give all areas of the Midlands access to low latency, resilient, and secure computing. Route diversity across a national network takes care of availability and resilience.
Businesses and other organisations will have access to all the tools and innovations they need to fulfil their digital plans, enabling them to create a virtuous circle. By increasing revenues, they can attract a much wider pool of talented individuals, who will take the organisation forward. In many cases, they will be able to do so remotely with no loss of performance or productivity, as edge computing is ideally suited to the hybrid patterns of work accelerated by the pandemic.
Lifting the barriers to regional success
Irrespective of location, edge will transform almost all areas of business, healthcare, and government right across the Midlands, and not just in the university cities. It will facilitate the vast expansion of artificial intelligence, machine learning, the internet of things (IoT) and enable higher levels of automation and efficiency in industry and agriculture.
Organisations will have full access to advanced computing and applications to transform their daily operational efficiency and to innovate and deliver products and services to new markets. They will be able to provide vastly improved customer experiences and embed sophisticated applications as part of their digital transformation ambitions.
By Simon Michie, CTO, Pulsant