Will cloud congestion fade into the fog?

Japanese industrial automation, test and measurement and software company Yokogawa Electric Corporation is investing in a Californian startup called FogHorn Systems, a developer of fog computing technology.

But what exactly is fog computing and why is it needed?

The best way to answer the latter point is that given the huge amount of data that is already cloud stored and given the monumental increase in data that the Internet of Everything will generate there are understandable concerns that network congestion could grow into a system disabling problem.

So that’s the reason, but what is fog computing and how will it solve that problem?

The term was originally created by Cisco and refers to extending cloud computing to the edge of a network. This makes networking services between end devices and cloud computing data centres more efficient by positioning the rapidly growing number of connected devices that will be created by the Internet of Everything and applications that consume cloud services and generate increasingly massive amounts of data computationally closer to each other.

So in essence fog computing can be evident in large cloud systems and big data structures and is tasked with making access to information more efficient.

Fog computing is structured to concentrate on end-users and client objectives and is perceived as supporting the potentially infinite amount of data generated by the Internet of Everything.

Yokogawa aims to foster development of fog computing technology through its investment in FogHorn Systems. By doing so it hopes to expand the range of solutions that it can provide, particularly given its work in industrial automation systems.