Is 2022 the year that edge computing gets down to business? In financial terms, edge has already arrived: IDC predicts that companies will spend $176 billion on edge computing worldwide this year, roughly a 15% increase from 2021. There may be more qualitative signs of edge computing's maturation in terms of architectural approaches, technical capabilities, enterprise use cases, security tactics, and more. "Even if we see echoes of older architectures in certain edge computing deployments, we also see developing edge trends that are genuinely new, or at least quite different from what existed previously," Gordon Haff, technology evangelist at Red Hat, wrote recently in his analysis of edge trends to watch in 2022. "And they're helping IT and business leaders solve problems in industries ranging from telco to automotive, for example, as both sensor data and machine learning (ML) data proliferates."

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella imagines a world with an ever-expanding set of connected devices that process data locally and work in tandem with the cloud – and his company has designed its entire multibillion-dollar cloud business around that concept. Nadella revealed the company's strategy for edge computing during Microsoft's recent shareholders meeting. Edge computing is a buzzword, but it basically means processing data on the devices themselves, instead of offsite in the cloud. Think of a self-driving car. It needs to be able to process data and make split-second decisions without the delays that would come if that data had to be processed far away in the cloud.