There are several quotes from Gil Press' Top 10 Tech Predictions For 2020 From IDC article that I like. The first one is about edge build-out.
Edge Build-Out: By 2023, over 50% of new enterprise IT infrastructure deployed will be at the edge rather than corporate datacenters, up from less than 10% today; by 2024, the number of apps at the edge will increase 800%.
The reason that I like this quote is the same reason I shifted my career from the enterprise to the edge: running apps against decentralized edge data is a tricky engineering problem. It's risky to trust that kind of data. I've thought about a solution to this problem (which I will discuss below).
Which brings me to the second quote that I like:
Trust Is Promoted: By 2023, 50% of the G2000 will name a Chief Trust Officer, who orchestrates trust across functions including security, finance, HR, risk, sales, production and legal.
The increase in the number of apps on the edge brings with it an increased worry in the trustworthiness of edge insights. It will be a requirement for someone (i.e., a Chief Trust Officer) to take ownership of data and application trust at the executive level.
By the time we reach 2023, I believe there will be a new tool in the Chief Trust Officer's toolbox: the Data Confidence Fabric (DCF).
The premise of a DCF is simple: as edge data and applications flow towards each other, trustworthiness will be measurable.
This idea borrows from enterprise storage systems. These systems performed enterprise trust insertion into data as it flowed towards enterprise applications. Applications were able to process the data with high confidence (often because trust insertion occurred as part of a bespoke, closed architecture). There was no need to measure the "confidence level" of the data. The origin, delivery speed, availability, protection, etc., were tightly controlled in a walled environment.
The hypothesis behind a data confidence fabric is that edge data can similarly benefit from trust insertion (read here for a list of potential trust insertion technologies in edge deployments).
Bespoke, closed architectures, however, cannot and will not work on the edge. No one vendor can insert trust across heterogeneous networks, firewalls, vendors, and geographies. This fact was the impetus behind the formation of a community that will collaborate on an industry-standard trust insertion and scoring framework. This framework will allow applications to access confidence scores and provenance metadata directly.
Dell technologists built the first data confidence fabric this past summer, and the code will serve as a seed to Project Alvarium.
The video below does an excellent job of painting a vision of the benefits of a DCF.
Speaking of confidence, I'm quite confident that Chief Trust Officers will insist that all of their data flow over this type of trust fabric in the decade to come.
Because measurable trust will not only reduce risk (e.g., compliance violations) in the short term. It will also fetch a higher price in the long run.
Steve
Dell Technologies Fellow
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