A second major restraint is the significant and often underestimated challenge of ensuring the security of the edge. The very nature of the distributed edge cloud—the pushing of the compute and the data out of the physically secure, fortress-like walls of the centralized data center and into thousands of more exposed and often physically insecure locations—creates a massive and fundamentally new set of security risks. This is a major restraint because each and every one of those thousands of edge nodes represents a new, potential entry point for an attacker into the network. The challenge of physically securing these devices (which might be located at the base of a cell tower or in the back room of a retail store), of ensuring the integrity of the software that is running on them, and of protecting the sensitive data that is being processed and stored at the edge is a profound and complex security problem. This requires a completely new, "zero trust" approach to security that is designed from the ground up for a distributed and often hostile environment.
Finally, the market is constrained by a host of significant and still-unresolved economic and business model challenges. The restraint is that while the technological vision of the edge is compelling, the business case and the question of "who pays for it" is still, in many cases, unclear. For the major telecommunications companies, the multi-billion-dollar investment that is required to build out a nationwide mobile edge computing (MEC) network is a massive financial gamble. It is still an open question as to whether the new, low-latency applications will emerge at a sufficient scale to generate the revenue that is needed to provide a clear and compelling return on that massive investment. This economic uncertainty is a major restraint that is, in some cases, slowing down the pace of the network build-out. Similarly, for the application developers, the pricing models for the edge are still in their very early stages and can be complex and difficult to predict, which can make it hard for them to build a clear business case for developing a new, edge-native application.
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