Why Your Business Needs to Treat Your Edge Data as Capital
Data is one of the most powerful resources at your organization’s disposal—a resource that may seem both infinite and underused.
It seems infinite because it is everywhere and it’s growing exponentially, as sectors including finance, telecommunications, pharma, health care, and manufacturing gather more data from more sources. And it seems underused because organizations gather far more of it than they can turn into new strategies to innovate, compete, and grow.
And the pressure is only mounting, with the proliferation of “edge computing”: all the cameras, sensors, and other Internet of Things (IoT) tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) that document activity from the remote locations where and when it happens.
Edge computing is yielding a deluge of data, and without the infrastructure and culture to manage it, or an organizational culture that embraces it, this incoming data can turn into wasted capital.
That conflict is at the heart of a “data paradox.” Many organizations say they need more data than they can get their hands on—but they’re already collecting more than they can process and analyze. While 64% of respondents to a recent Forrester study, commissioned by Dell Technologies, consider data “the lifeblood of their organization,” only 23% said they treat data as capital and prioritize its use across the business. And 87% of organizations are neglecting their data technology and processes, their data culture and skills, or both.
Your Capital, Your Risks
What are the risks of squandering this capital?
Organizations operating with legacy infrastructure that lock up their data in silos prevent their workforces from sharing the information across practices and mining it for the integrated insights that could boost their real-time understanding of their audiences and support their customer experience (CX).
Legacy operations may also leave an organization vulnerable to unnecessary storage costs, data loss or theft, and reputational damage. And even beyond the unpredictable, any routine maintenance and planned inspections that take infrastructure offline amount to costly downtime.
Reducing “Dwell Time” with Data
With 28% of U.S. products now transported by rail, it’s critical to keep the trains moving.
One of the primary metrics railroads operate with is “velocity”: the total travel time (hours) divided by the total distance traveled (miles). When railcars are moving and operational, railroads can maximize and expand capacity, increase equipment availability, shorten cycle times, and boost on-time performance. But the total travel time also includes any “dwell time”—the hours when a train is not moving.
Freight-railroad industry leaders are improving performance by working with Duos Technologies (Nasdaq: DUOT), which provides turnkey technology solutions to automatically inspect in-transit railcars and includes AI-enabled edge-computing servers to capture images, model data, and handle sophisticated analytics and reporting on location—all while the trains keep running at track speeds up to 90 mph.
In strategic locations along 140,000 miles of rail track throughout North America, Duos’s network of sensor-agnostic inspection portals run on edge-computing processors, data servers, storage, and networking that collect, process, and analyze images and data sets of railcar defects. Each location can generate as much as 30 TB of data per day.
By streamlining the previously labor-intensive manual railcar inspection process, this technology dramatically reduces the amount of time a railcar is stopped and “in-dwell,” which increases the velocity of the train.
Beyond converting this wealth of data into powerful capital for analytics and efficiency, the automated AI-powered edge-computing solution can increase employee safety and security.
Duos’s edge-computing portals can automatically detect issues at track speed. Using remote server management tools, Duos can access system logs and event notifications to monitor tracking trends, hardware failures, and firmware and basic input/output system (BIOS) updates to rebuild a server remotely, saving $3,000 per instance.
Duos also applies this edge-computing technology to other transportation industries (trucking and intermodal) and transit railroads across North America.
Putting Data to Work
Even organizations outside the freight industry can see that valuable insights no longer come exclusively from data centers and the public cloud. Increasingly, they also come from the edge, where the data is generated.
Supporting your edge infrastructure with the optimal suite of compute, storage, and analytics solutions can help your organization get insights in real time and on location—and uncover hidden growth opportunities.
However plentiful your organization’s data from the edge may seem, and however you may be getting by without tapping it to its fullest, a suite of edge-computing solutions can help you convert your data into invaluable capital. Your edge data is capital that could be helping you grow your business. Don’t let it go to waste.
Learn more about the Dell solutions that can help your organization use your edge data to its fullest.