“60% of global IT leaders require a latency of <10ms for their apps.”

In addition, 60 percent of global IT decision makers require a latency of 10 milliseconds or less for their applications, and one in five require 5 milliseconds or less (Figure 9).

These factors make edge compute seem like an obvious choice for many workloads; so why are many enterprise IT infrastructures still focused so heavily on-premises and/or in a centralized cloud? Market availability appears to be the only thing holding edge compute back: 90 percent of global IT decision makers say they would move their organization’s applications from on-premises to edge compute if it was available today (Figure 10).

The Lumen Platform will deliver IT agility with edge compute capabilities for high-performance, low-latency data and application experiences. Designed to deliver 5ms or better latency via numerous edge market nodes, organizations using the Lumen Platform have broad capabilities to deploy next-generation technologies and applications.

Edge compute is a critical enabler for 5G

Although many people think of 5G when they think of “the edge,” nearly three in four global IT decision makers agree that 5G needs edge compute more than edge compute needs 5G (Figure 11).

Edge compute is the secret weapon enabling 5G according to 82 percent of global IT decision makers. They say 5G needs edge compute to deliver the performance and experience necessary for their business to succeed (Figure 12).

However, not all global IT decision makers are excited about 5G. Nearly 30 percent of global IT decision makers and 33 percent of U.S. IT decision makers say they are skeptical about their company using 5G networks (Figure 13).

Although 5G does bring some excitement, a majority of global IT decision makers have significant security concerns when it comes to relying on 5G networks .