By 2022, 75 percent of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside the centralized data center or cloud — an increase from the less than 10 percent generated today, according to Gartner. A distributed cloud is the distribution of public cloud services to locations outside of the cloud provider’s data centers, allowing for data centers to be located anywhere. The evolution from a centralized public cloud to distributed public cloud ushers in a new of cloud computing.
The distributed cloud is in the early stages of development with many provides offering only a small subset of their services in a distributed way. It supports continuously connected and intermittently connected operation of cloud services from the public cloud distributed to specific and varied locations. This enables low-latency services where the cloud services are closer to the point of need in remote data centers or all the way to the edge device itself, delivering major improvements in performance and reducing the risk of network-related outages. By 2024, most cloud service platforms will provide at least some services that execute at the point of need.