Fog and Fogonomics

5Quantitative and Qualitative Economic Benefits of Fog

Joe Weinman

XFORMA LLC, Flanders, NJ, USA

Fog computing is a rapidly emerging computing paradigm, which represents an evolution of the last wave of computing – cloud, and its benefits [1] – from dozens or hundreds of highly centralized facilities to tens of billions of endpoint devices, edge processing and storage, intermediate layers, and the networks to tie them all together.

To pigeonhole fog computing as just a technology architecture, however, would be a mistake. The reason for its rapid emergence is that it delivers a broad variety of quantitative and qualitative benefits to businesses, consumers, governments, and societies. Some may be exactly characterized, such as cost optimization or backhaul traffic reduction. Others are more situation‐dependent, such as revenue generation through user experience enhancement through latency reduction via geographic dispersion.

It would be a mistake to characterize fog computing as an improvement to prior existing solutions. Instead, it expands the toolkit available to enterprise architects and solution builders including product and service developers. With this expanded toolkit come numerous choices, and with those choices, come numerous trade‐offs [2]. As one example, placing applications and data close to the edge helps reduce latency and improve reliability for edge and endpoint applications that leverage edge and endpoint capabilities such as processing, sensing, storing, ...