Cloud networking vendor Aviatrix has been examining the architecture construct and notion of data gravity, which Product Manager Madhuri Kaniganti told SDxCentral is shifting toward edge networks.

"You have seen many enterprises move to cloud, but the data gravity is also shifting to some extent to the edge networks," Kaniganti said. Data gravity refers to the idea that as growing organizations create, gather, store, and exchange larger amounts of data, applications and services will be attracted to that data due to the bandwidth or latency requirements of those apps and services.

As data grows, it isn't pushed toward apps and services – gravity begins pulling them to the data that resides, for example, in edge networks. This process repeats and compounds, which increases the overall mass of the data and makes it difficult to duplicate or relocate.

This concept begs the question of how to carry over cloud-like agility to distributed edge locations like branches and factories floors. "These locations will still require some kind of an agile model in terms of not just collecting the edge network, but also being able to bring that operational model down these distributed edge locations," she explained.

Reliance on a siloed solution in those scenarios won't cut it, she argued. "I want to be able to actually deploy my edge network in a consistent way, build a data plane, and be able to also operationalize it such that I don't require an IT team to sit on site. I'm able to simply plug in and connect my network and then do any kind of rolling upgrades or be able to troubleshoot my network remotely," and all through a cloud-like model, Kaniganti added.

She predicts enterprises will continue shifting toward this type of architecture to build multi-cloud connectivity models for edge networks in distributed environments.