# What is Edge Computing?

> Edge computing places selected computation, storage, and application functions close to a data source, user, device, or required action instead of relying exclusively on a distant centralized service.

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## Content

An edge location can be inside a device, at a site or gateway, within an access network, or at a nearby provider facility; there is no single universal topology.

Workloads may be distributed across edge and cloud locations to meet latency, bandwidth, availability, data-location, or autonomy needs. This creates a fleet of heterogeneous platforms and management paths that must be secured throughout deployment, operation, and retirement.

### Key points

- **Place workloads by requirement:** Locate processing and data according to response time, connectivity, cost, capacity, privacy, regulatory, safety, and consistency needs; nearest is not always best.
- **Secure distributed platforms:** Inventory nodes and workloads, establish device and workload identity, protect boot and update chains, harden management interfaces, isolate tenants or functions, encrypt communications, and collect usable telemetry.
- **Design for partition and recovery:** Define behavior during disconnection, protect queued data, prevent replay or duplicated action, reconcile state safely, and test orchestration, failover, rollback, and decommissioning.
- **Important limitation:** Edge placement does not inherently guarantee low latency, privacy, resilience, or security. Physical exposure, limited resources, inconsistent administration, unavailable updates, and stale distributed state can create risks that a centralized design does not have.

### Related terms

[IoT edge](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/iot-edge/>) · [Network edge](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/network-edge/>) · [Cloud security](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/cloud-security/>) · [Cloud-native security](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/cloud-native-security/>) · [Network latency](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/network-latency/>)

### Sources

[NIST SP 500-325, Fog Computing Conceptual Model](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/500/325/final) · [ETSI, Multi-access Edge Computing](https://www.etsi.org/technical-groups/mec/) · [NIST IR 8320, Hardware-Enabled Security for Cloud and Edge Computing Use Cases](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/ir/8320/final)

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