In a recent webinar, Chris Irwin, a consultant at J2 Innovations, discussed the pros and cons of managing data at the edge and in the cloud. Below is a synopsis of his presentation. You can watch the full webinar, "Managing Real-Time Data—at the Edge or in the Cloud," here.
In general, building owners want more of their buildings, and increasingly want to optimize their most expensive asset. This has led to higher and higher expectations of what can be achieved. This has been enabled predominately through better access to data and information using applications from anytime, anywhere.
There are two main camps for how to approach this challenge: sending all the data to the cloud or managing all the data at the edge. Chris first discusses the pros and cons of sending building data to the cloud.
He continues the comparison with managing the data at the edge.
Spoiler alert: the answer is both! The importance of data standardization and data modeling is the key.
He poses the question: where do you put your brain?
"I think you do both. There is an edge manager where you put intelligence at the site level, but you also have intelligence at the cloud level to do the higher functions of managing the organization in a multi-site application."
