Use cases, adoption drivers and barriers

The section below presents the most common use cases observed in the key verticals of the CEI. This section highlights selected use cases and some of their typical requirements that might lead to various decisions about the cloud-edge compute continuum.

Drivers and Barriers for The Adoption of CEI 

Drivers 

Cloud: European companies reach out to cloud technologies for multiple reasons, focusing on optimising current operational models and seeking tools to drive new business value creation.

Edge: The edge market’s development in Europe is driven by tremendous benefits and business goals the technology brings on various organisations that want to unlock more value from data and achieve greater business outcomes.

IoT: Organisations utilise IoT for many reasons. It can help organisations control costs, thereby contributing to the bottom line. But it also helps organisations improve the top line by improving customer experience, product quality, or introducing new products and services.

Barriers 

Cloud: Most challenges in cloud adoption are related to security and governance. Despite the relatively high cloud adoption, the success rate of cloud projects is still far from ideal. The main reasons for the projects’ unsuccess were security and trust issues, inability to integrate well with on-premises applications, other cloud services, and edge and lack of skills. In addition, research shows that companies also struggle with the lack of cloud culture and face performance and reliability issues.

Edge: According to the IDC Europe Emerging Technologies Survey, the lack of qualified workforce and skills is the primary barrier organisations face, as almost one-third do not have, or are not able to find, the right specialised and technical workforce to implement and adequately use edge technologies. Hence, receiving support from service providers and training and specialising the workforce will be critical for any organisation.

IoT remains a relatively new technology space, with an emerging ecosystem developing and simplifying the technology, integrating components, developing best practices, and standardising solutions for critical use cases. While this maturation process is underway, multiple challenges and implementation barriers remain. Organisations must be aware of these challenges and the steps they can take to overcome them to obtain concrete benefits.