If you think information technology is distributed now, watch as companies opt to move it further out to the edge of the computing networks. Many enterprises may need to set up clouds all over the globe for advanced analytics, the internet of things and even compliance. 

The COVID-19 pandemic and remote-everything trend have shown us all how large systems can be split into numerous edge locations.

“We have seen a real uptick in terms of edge opportunities since the pandemic hit,” since Paul Savill (pictured), senior vice president of product management and services at Lumen Technologies. 

Savill spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed the next generation of distributed edge computing and Lumen’s partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. (* Disclosure below.)

Cloud’s homes away from home

One example of how organizations are pivoting during the pandemic is CyberReef Inc., which Lumen worked with on internet cybersecurity technology to protect students’ end user devices. CyberReef needed to place software control tools close to the edge with good connection to the internet accessed by actual children in various areas.

“They have deployed, across the country … their platform, basically, on our platform [integrating global networking, cloud connectivity, etc.] to support those deployments to help our children as they get educated,” Savill said. 

Many enterprises will need to look at improving their distributed IT and edge strategies even beyond the pandemic, according to Savill. Sheer performance is an obvious reason — data-heavy, compute-intensive artificial intelligence and machine learning use cases benefit from fast interaction at the edge. Also, it sometimes makes economic sense to keep compute and storage close to the markets a business serves.

Finally, Lumen is seeing use cases where customers want to keep data local to certain markets in order to comply with data governance and privacy laws. 

To cast the best cloud technology wide enough to serve customers, Lumen is partnering with AWS, whose Outposts offering extends AWS infrastructure and services into virtually any data center. Lumen is working with AWS on certifying its hundreds of global data centers as Outposts deployment locations.

“We’ve been training our IT professionals on the Outposts solution … so that we can bring joint products to market,” Savill concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Lumen Technologies sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Lumen nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE