SÉAMUS JONES
EDGE COMPUTING
For most enterprises, achieving subsecond latency is a welcome benefit, but it is rarely the primary financial catalyst. Instead, the driving motivation is bandwidth optimisation – reducing the massive costs of streaming raw, unstructured data back to a central cloud provider.
“ Legacy is what triggers the edge conversations,” says Séamus Jones, Director, Technical Marketing Engineering at Dell Technologies.“ If you do real-time quality inspection on a manufacturing line, control autonomous equipment, or make an immediate fraud decision, sending everything back to a distant data centre might be a non-starter.”
Once companies realise low latency is not a silver bullet, they pivot toward resilience.
“ Once companies move beyond the initial justification, they quickly realise that simple, rock-solid engineered platforms and remote management become just as important as latency, if not more,” Séamus says.“ Running infrastructure in a data centre is very different from running it across hundreds or thousands of locations at the edge, many of which have little or no IT staff.”
Mapping the risk landscape: From‘ far edge’ to‘ far cloud’ To manage risk effectively, organisations must recognise that“ the edge” is not a single point in the data chain. It operates across a spectrum of proximity, where every step closer to the end user trades central oversight for physical security.
SÉAMUS JONES
TITLE: DIRECTOR, TECHNICAL MARKETING ENGINEERING
COMPANY: DELL TECHNOLOGIES
INDUSTRY: COMPUTER HARDWARE MANUFACTURING
Séamus specialises in edge computing, distributed architectures and scalable AI infrastructure that bridges central cloud capabilities with real-world enterprise operations.
At the outermost limit sit vehicles, factory floor machines, and utility pole devices operating at the far-edge. The primary advantage is immediate action – processing video, sensor data or machine telemetry locally instead of transmitting it hundreds of miles away. However, these nodes exist outside protected data centres, leaving them exposed to physical theft, hardware tampering, extreme weather and severe power constraints.
Sitting slightly further back are near-edge capabilities, located in central regional offices or nearby 5G cell base stations. The near-edge offers the most balanced risk-reward profile: latency remains low enough for real-time workloads, yet the environment is far easier to secure, cluster for resilience and manage remotely.
At the opposite extreme is the farcloud, the traditional home of heavy computing operated by hyperscalers. While far-cloud facilities offer unlimited scale and centralised management, their physical distance places them at the slowest end of the latency spectrum.
96 October 2026