Best practices for maximizing success at the edge

[MattQuirk]

As more and more businesses recognize the benefits of placing compute and intelligence in their edge locations, it’s important for OEM innovators and their customers to avoid the common missteps of edge IT deployments. Here are five best practices for navigating around potential pitfalls and amplifying success at the edge.

#1: Understand the big picture of digital transformation

It’s common for deployment planning teams to be laser-focused on delivering the solution for an immediate problem. When edge deployments are handled as one-offs, an organization can end up with a disjointed mix of solutions that address particular challenges, but don’t advance—and could work against—larger strategic goals.

OEMs should have a vision of the role their solution will play in their target customers’ overall digital transformation journey. Having this context enables OEMs to build edge solutions that both address today’s challenges and contribute to future goals. HPE OEM Solutions offers guidance and strategies—including an exclusive partner playbook—to help you ask the right discovery questions in the process. This will give you the clarity to start creating strategic solutions that are designed to operate with your target customers’ overall business proposition in mind.

#2: Plan for scaling and complexity

Another pitfall of viewing each edge deployment as a discrete, one-off solution is how quickly the infrastructure can become unwieldly. One or two edge deployments might seem easy enough, but what happens when the solution is rolled out to hundreds of diverse locations? Or when workloads unexpectedly skyrocket? Or when many different edge solutions are deployed?

Complexity grows exponentially with more locations and applications. Every deployment introduces another unique set of criteria and constraints, as well as new hardware, software, storage, and networking. Success in the long term comes by being prepared to manage and adapt to changing variables, diverse assets, and new workloads.

HPE GreenLake offers OEMs and enterprises powerful tools and capabilities for taming complexity and managing diverse edge environments. Its single-pane-of-glass dashboard provides visibility, streamlines monitoring, and facilitates management across distributed deployments within the same country. In addition, having this oversight makes it easy to provision services and scale IT capacity up or down as needed.

#3: Consider the complete service lifecycle

Even the most robust and reliable hardware and software will need maintenance and updates at some point. Don’t overlook planning for how your customer’s collection of disaggregated edge hardware and software will be serviced, patched, updated, and repaired in the months and years after deployment.

HPE GreenLake simplifies monitoring system health and enables remote deployment of software and firmware updates. When hands-on support is needed, HPE Services and its global network of authorized service providers are ready to help you with on-site maintenance, repairs, and refreshes in your customers’ locations worldwide.

#4: Keep security top-of-mind

For a long time in IT, security was thought of as something that you bolted on at the end of a deployment to add protection. In today’s data-centric world, it’s critical to plan and maintain robust and seamless security from end to end. Security planning needs to encompass every touchpoint and interaction across data centers, colocation facilities, clouds, endpoint devices, and physical environments involved. This starts with best-of-breed security built into every component, network, connection, and application.

HPE builds industry-leading hardware security directly into its products. HPE ProLiant Gen11 servers, for example, integrates the HPE Silicon Root of Trust, a unique digital footprint that protects firmware code from malware attacks. Meanwhile, HPE GreenLake comes with a built-in, zero-trust framework that enhances security from end to end.

HPE also developed the HPE Trusted Supply Chain to start protecting customer applications and data even before HPE servers are deployed. This comprehensive set of best practices and technologies provides secure supply chain operations throughout the design, manufacturing, and delivery processes to prevent product tampering and counterfeits. HPE OEM partners can also rely on HPE security experts for help in strategizing and optimizing comprehensive security solutions for your unique customer needs.

#5: Think bigger

My last piece of advice expands on the first best practice. In addition to understanding how deployments fit into digital transformation, look at edge IT as part of a hybrid cloud continuum. In the age of AI, edge technologies can do far more than solve specific challenges. They give the organization the ability to sense, understand, and intelligently respond to real-time conditions in the field. These capabilities can also become superpowers that unlock opportunities and deliver value throughout the entire enterprise.

Look beyond simply building the solution for the defined application. Consider how edge IT and its data could be orchestrated with other assets and applications in the hybrid cloud to enhance other parts of your customer’s business. Project and plan for the solution could evolve over the next year, five years, ten years. Design solutions with the flexibility to easily scale and combine with new innovations that are still to come.  

Thinking bigger about edge solutions is a powerful key for deepening your customer relationships. Let’s talk about how HPE OEM Solutions can help you develop edge IT strategies and roadmaps extending value across the hybrid cloud continuum.