Here, There, and Everywhere

Distributed cloud computing is bringing the cloud closer to all of us

- REENA GHOSH

The growth of distributed cloud computing is one of research and consulting firm Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020. Gartner defines a distributed cloud as “the distribution of public cloud services to different physical locations, while the operation, governance, updates, and evolution of the services are the responsibility of the originating public cloud provider.”

This implies a geographically dispersed network of small clouds outside the cloud provider’s data center, with the provider being responsible for operating, managing, and securing cloud services across the distributed cloud network. The distributed cloud model thus enables a network of multiple clouds with processing capabilities outside the cloud provider’s central data center.

Distributed cloud provides for the extension of cloud services comprising a combination of hardware and software, such as applications, tools, platforms, security, services, and infrastructure, to customers’ data centers and devices at the edge. Computer resources, storage, and other components at these sites are linked to the provider’s cloud data centers.

According to Gartner, the cloud provider in a distributed cloud model is typically responsible for designing, architecting, distributing, managing, and updating these hardware and software components. Gartner expects that, by 2023, major cloud providers will develop a “distributed ATM-like presence” to deliver a subset of their cloud services for applications for which latency is critical.

Conception and growth