Run Untrustworthy Data Out of Town

The Edge: A New Frontier

I used to love shows about the Wild West when I was a kid. People came from everywhere to stake their claims and make their fortunes. They lived on the edge of civilization, trying to create value for themselves and their families. Anything was possible — and that usually meant criminals swaggered around town doing whatever they wanted. That is, until the sheriff showed up and formed a posse to chase them out of town.

Right now, the edge is like the Wild West. The edge is where data is created and acted upon to create immediate, essential value. Edge computing delivers many benefits — such as faster, better insights using more data at the point of creation and consumption — but those benefits don’t come without challenges.

Edge Data: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

As edge data becomes more central to business decision making and as enterprise data is increasingly combined with external data to enhance analytics and artificial intelligence, it’s more critical than ever to ensure that all the data used for decision making is trustworthy and transparent. Because of this, the industry is recognizing the importance of digital monitoring, reporting and verification, designed to keep bad actors out of your data and out of your decisions.

Like the Sheriff of Deadwood, Dell Technologies has gotten together with the larger open-source community and formed a posse to drive bad data out of town. Project Alvarium, with the initial code seeded by Dell Technologies, is building a framework for a Data Confidence Fabric (DCF) that can deliver data from the edge, data center and cloud to devices and applications — with an industry-first, measurable confidence score.

Data Confidence Fabric (DCF) framework graphic.

DCF: The New Sheriff in Town

DCF fulfills the four principles of data trust — attest, transform, annotate and audit. It provides a standardized way of quantifying, screening, measuring and determining whether data meets your organization’s relevancy and trust standards to deliver more confident insights. Dell’s open-source contribution tracks the trustworthy handling of edge data from its creation and delivery to applications and across different vendors, networks and geographies.

Ensuring the trustworthiness and transparency of data is essential for organizations of all types and sizes. Early use cases for the Dell Technologies revolutionary data confidence solution will likely revolve around industries where edge data is proliferating and trustworthy data is critical for protecting lives and health, such as healthcare, industrial Internet of Things, digital twins, smart cities, military and government.

Find out how you can use the power of open source to put together a data confidence posse and start leveraging more trustworthy data across the wild west of your data estate. Discover more at our edge solutions page.

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