Fog's Strategy

When we look at Fog on a trivial level, we simply look at it as data’s stop-off point before going to the cloud. However, this is an absolute miss! Instead, the more important aspect of Fog computing to consider, and which is often overlooked is the fact that not necessarily all, or even most data processed in the Fog is ever sent to or known by the cloud.

This is the leveraging of the fog we must consider to begin to have a successful fog mobile data processing strategy. Processing in the fog/at the edge stands to minimize data transmission and the load on cloud processing. The Fog is not a data delay TO the cloud - it’s an offload of processing to PRE-Process the cloud load and minimize data transmissions.

Fog's Edge

Once we look at our edge capabilities and decide how to best leverage them, we then need to take a step back and evaluate what that means for our cloud services. How will our data processing at the edge impact our API end-points - or the design and integration of our cloud services and resources - how will the fog preprocessing prior to upload effect our cloud architecture?

While Fog computing is at the micro level, it absolutely impacts an organization’s large-scale decisions. Remember, this can have both cost savings and increased expense consequence and the following must be taken into account to minimize the risk to both the organization as well as the individual:

• Fog Processing/Computing cost: This could be looked at from a power consumption perspective
• Data Transmission: How quickly and/or often are you sending data after fog processing? Again, at the cost of the user’s data plan
• How much computing power does the pre-processing save in the cloud? Large number of customers means a ton a data - be certain it’s optimized