High bandwidth requirements are commonplace in today’s businesses, and the trend is growing for higher capacity, and with that comes more massive storage requirements, more compute and a stronger and more resilient infrastructure.

To alleviate an oversubscribed public internet, there are several product types on today’s market. Some involve the purchase of private capacity in the form of SD-WANs, others might make use of third-party CDNs (depending on use cases), but overall, the most effective way for reducing reliance on stretched connectivity throughput is by the deployment of local technology. That is, making available the compute, storage and networking in edge deployments.

For larger enterprises, highly localized edge facilities can be supplemented by regional edge hubs, which in turn lighten the bandwidth and resource burdens of centralized data centers. It’s this type of distributed edge-centric topology that requires the kind of technologies and support systems on offer by APC by Schneider Electric, the world’s leading provider of fully-integrated local technologies: it’s with Schneider Electric that even the smallest retail outlying establishment or ROBO can become, as of itself, a micro data center.

Whether your organization has hundreds of retail units, is a utility with many thousands of distributed distribution nodes, or a large company with dozens of discrete offices spread across continents, the type of functionality and resilience needed means turning to one supplier.

The historical problem of local, edge-deployed IT has always been lack of local resources – staff or technology systems – combined with the literal multiplier of the number of remote sites. In short, the larger the number of facilities that opened up, the higher the burden on IT infrastructure and management.

Unlike in many areas of business and economics, there have never been economies of scale for new edge deployments. In fact, quite the opposite was true: the greater the number of remote installations, the more complex the overall WAN topology, and the worse the management headaches.

Into this situation the new generation of infrastructure provisioning technologies from APC by Schneider Electric arrives, making deployment and management of edge-based computing & infrastructure a process that errs on the right side of economies of scale.

Using pre-configured hardware and a powerful, overarching management solution, APC by Schneider Electric can reduce field engineering costs by over 25 percent, and bring about significant cuts to remote maintenance costs. By removing the need for on-site resources and staffing to achieve a stable technology framework, APC empowers companies to concentrate on improving localized services, without having to worry about the basis of the technologies that provide those improvements.

In retail stores, for example, deployment of customer traffic managing (such as proactive queue monitoring) can be achieved without having to push gigabytes of data to the central data center for processing. In industry, localized infrastructure can support proactive machinery maintenance scheduling using AI-powered algorithms, all on site. The type of provisioning and support that Schneider Electric provides can only be achieved by a high level of system abstraction that’s designed for today’s bandwidth- and resource-sensitive frameworks.

Unfortunately, edge-based computing facilities are a temptation to undesirables. That’s always been the case, even in the days of traditional, “lights-off” IT setups in remote areas. Keeping tabs on proper physical security in edge data centers is of critical importance, whether the threat is from thieves, fire, or flood. With APC by Schneider, you can protect your investments with access control mechanisms, real-time audio & video recording, and even monitor sensitive spaces with temperature sensors and humidity detectors.

By placing the required compute, storage and infrastructure components in place in localized edge setups, businesses can continue with growth plans, without having to concern themselves with the minutiae of infrastructure provision, maintenance, and scalability. From ensuring smooth power supplies to instant failover and localized machine-learning, there’s really only one supplier of the next-generation managed IT services you need.

APC by Schneider Electric can provide the type of framework that’s built for growth in a 5G world and push organizations to the next level of digital transformation. Check out its extensive portfolio of solutions specifically designed for (among others), the healthcare, retail, manufacturing and banking industries.