EY & Dell Technologies provide enterprises with a path to innovation with Edge Cloud

My colleague Tom Reuner points out that many CIOs are concerned about their hyperscaler spending due to high storage, computing, and processing costs. This ‘cloud remorse’ leads to contract renegotiations and a repatriation of resources from cloud to on-premises. As such, CIOs are still searching for the cloud’s silver lining. For companies dealing with rising costs and complexity and implementing operational technologies (OT) to capture and process data, augmenting their public cloud solutions with edge cloud is an attractive option.

Computing at the edge offers CIOs several advantages:

1. Faster access to data: Firms can reduce the transmission latency from exchanging, processing, and accessing data when it requires a remote server.
2. More reliable computing: Adopting edge can boost computing reliability by improving how essential data and applications are processed near the users — reducing the time needed to access, retrieve, and apply the data to the work at hand.
3. Better security: Security improves as data is processed, managed, and stored locally with on-site or near-site encryption and access management.

Moving to the Edge isn’t lost on CIOs, as more than 70% of IT leaders see it as a viable investment in the next two years to augment their cloud strategies.

In HFS’s Pulse Survey of more than 600 Global 2000 decision-makers (see Exhibit 1), data shows that 71% of business and IT leaders indicate they will increase investments in edge cloud technologies during the next two years. Drilling into industry responses shows that 82% of manufacturing, energy, and utilities leaders consider investing in edge technologies an important investment in the next two years.

Exhibit 1: Edge technologies are on the radar for significant investment from large enterprises in the next two years.

Source: HFS Pulse, 2024: n=605 Global 2000 enterprise firms

With an intent to invest in delivering business outcomes, many firms are either creating industry cloud solutions, offering ways to optimize local data centers, or finding ways to collaborate. Two firms that have chosen to collaborate include Dell Technologies and EY. These two companies are combining their industry, technology, and talent to enhance their customers’ abilities, augment computing and cloud investments, and improve their desired business outcomes.

EY and Dell Technologies bring their Edge Lab initiative to improve how data and workloads can drive value with more predictable costs and results.

EY and Dell Technologies (Dell) are carving a new path by offering CIOs their Edge Lab initiative to address the growing need to optimize workloads across public cloud solutions. EY/Dell’s Edge solution enables operational technology edge computing to augment many firms’ public cloud needs. By investing in an edge cloud solution, firms can improve how they capture, compute, and deliver data by processing this data closer to its source. Firms with these needs include industrial environments such as manufacturing plants, oil rigs, and utility facilities. EY/Dell Technologies’ approach brings computational capabilities that speed decision-making by locating a ‘cloud’ close to the source and reducing the lag time between the compute resources and the devices and sensors collecting data from the physical world.

While edge computing isn’t new, EY and Dell Technologies’ solution combines consulting, hardware, software, and industry expertise to focus on specific industry-centric solutions their clients can adopt to re-architect their applications, data, and business transformation efforts. The Edge Lab initiative acts as an innovation lab for clients to build a proof of concept using Dell Technology’s hardware and software and EY’s managed services and industry know-how.

A switch of data processing from multicloud to the edge reduces costs, decreases latency, and boosts business performance

In a recent HFS study, nearly 95% of enterprises we surveyed have some buyer’s remorse from a primary hyperscaler contract. Cost and lock-in remain vital concerns; less than one-third of all cloud transformations meet budget and timeline constraints. Most of these costs come from poorly executed ‘lift-and-shift’ efforts. Too many firms only migrated their data center-based applications, data, and workloads carte blanche to the cloud. While they expected to recoup costs by shedding capex, the opex of data access, computing, management, storage, and applications workloads increased.

NativeEdge facilitates data orchestration, security, localized processing, and embedded AI smarts near the device or user

At the core of this alliance is Dell Technology’s NativeEdge technology. NativeEdge embeds a control layer into the hardware, enabling enterprises to manage, secure, and orchestrate data access, use, and orchestration across endpoints, including computers, IoT devices, and operational technologies. Dell Technologies and EY are combining their AI capabilities to advance how companies implement edge technologies and continuously improve system operations.

Dell Technologies cites Bosch and Eaton as companies applying edge technology models with AI to enhance how data and systems bring an added advantage to their end-users and customers. The addition of EY and establishing the Edge Lab program allow for extended business-led transformation efforts by enabling customers to prototype architectures, workloads, and information management solutions quickly.

In addition to Dell Technology’s solutions, EY adds industry expertise, governance, and FinOps capabilities to aid financial teams in projecting costs and building return-on-investment models for their customers. Combining technology, governance, and audit services can result in a better balance of IT and business outcomes.

There is no easy road, and the alliance must balance its partnerships with hyperscalers, telcos, and SaaS vendors

If edge networks are to grow, they will require integrating new wireless technologies. With multiple standards evolving from Open RAN to 5G and CBRS technologies, EY and Dell Technologies will need to help clients understand the impact of these (and other emerging) technologies and how to integrate them into their investments over time. Additionally, deploying management technologies to operate edge and public cloud solutions is bound to create concerns about duplicative efforts. EY and Dell Technologies may need to add playbooks offering customers insights into how they can address new tech and trends as part of their innovation lab engagements.

Finally, as Dell Technologies and EY look to assist in optimizing workloads from hyperscaler partners, they will be altering the economics of how their ecosystem generates revenues. While potentially suitable for the customer, EY and Dell must balance their value proposition alongside their cloud partners to help enterprise customers realize edge innovation.

The Bottom Line: Dell and EY offer something new and relevant to the market by bringing the data, AI, security, and speed conversation to the edge in a ‘closer to the user’ model.

Adopting edge technologies with the help of EY and Dell Technologies may make sense for CIOs in industries with significant investment plans for OT and IoT implementations. Bringing computing resources closer to the data source for processing and redistribution to the machines and people who need the technology can create a clear path to their return on investment.