Edge computing is accelerating, pushing more IT into remote locations. That shift has made 2026 a pivotal year to rethink data center deployment. Is a central data center — or even a central cloud — the best deployment strategy for an increasingly distributed IT environment? Or should CIOs and data center managers expand their footprint with micro data centers at the edge?
What’s driving the shift
Grand View Research projects the edge computing market in the U.S. will reach $327.79 billion in 2033, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 33% from 2025 to 2033.
In this drive to the edge, the business use cases are many and varied. They include remote manufacturing; distribution centers and retail stores that need to run “on their own”; IoT security and handheld devices in distributed facilities and campus buildings; logistics operations with cars, trucks and train cargoes that move and must be tracked via IoT sensors throughout the supply chain; and telemedicine conferences and in-home medical devices that monitor the health of patients. Enterprises have the lion’s share of these edge implementations because they are the companies most likely to have distributed operations.
Here’s what doesn’t change in the push to the edge: IT is still expected to support it all.
How edge computing reshapes the data center
The biggest change to what we have always understood as the data center is a conceptual one. Data centers are no longer centralized “glass houses” that reside somewhere inside a headquarters building. Instead, data centers are becoming amorphous entities that span traditional data centers, multiple clouds and a chain of micro data centers at remote edge sites.
To facilitate this expanded data center concept, IT must:
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Install servers, storage racks and network hardware at each edge micro data center.
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Move other IT assets (e.g., software, communications, backup equipment) to remote edge sites so they can operate independently, but in ways that are supported and secure.
Friction points at the edge
There are three areas of challenge that IT must contend with as data centers are restructured:
IoT standardization gaps: As Grand View pointed out, a major component of edge deployments is hardware in the form of servers, network equipment, storage racks and IoT sensors and devices. It is challenging for IT to maintain all these components as part of a global corporate data center unless there are specific standards set for the equipment and operating systems purchased.
In this scenario, central purchasing becomes a key player, as does a full endorsement of the equipment and OS standardization policy from the CEO and other C-level executives. What must be avoided is the tendency of citizen IT users to go out on their own and purchase equipment that is incompatible with the enterprise IT infrastructure.
Standardization must especially be rigorously applied to IoT phones, tablets, RFID (radio frequency identification) readers, sensors and other devices. It’s IoT that poses the greatest risk to IT incompatibility and support, because vendors in this space often use their own homegrown operating systems, and provide little or no product support.
Container consistency across sites: Software, if it is to be miniaturized and distributed to micro data centers, must remain interoperable throughout the enterprise. At each edge location, what IT delivers are containerized “micro systems” of operating systems, IT infrastructure components and applications. However, when a change occurs to an underlying IT infrastructure component, operating system or application, that change must be uniformly installed across all containers that are being used at the edge in order to maintain enterprise interoperability. It’s up to IT to do this.
Zero-trust and identity networks: In 2025, 60% of enterprise security breaches were the result of human activity, according to a DeepStrike report, “The Human Hack: 2025 Social Engineering Statistics, Trends, and Future Threats.” Internal users continue to fall victim to phishing attacks where they open attachments in scam emails that appear to be from someone legitimate — and now with AI, there are growing numbers of deepfake videos and phone calls.
Enterprise HR and IT departments know this, and they train users in corporate security protocols — but the cybercrooks are clever, too. These bad actors know that the security attack surface has expanded with the growth of edge micro data centers and the widespread use of security-vulnerable IoT devices.
Companies are responding by investing in zero-trust networks, as evidenced by the expected growth of the U.S. zero-trust network market to $4.18 billion by 2030 from $1.34 billion (a 25% compound annual growth rate).
Zero-trust networks enable IT to observe any IT assets that are added, subtracted or modified on networks anywhere — and they are indispensable technology if IT is to monitor all IT, no matter where it is.
Equally important is assuring that users are properly credentialed and authorized for the network resources that they use. An individual user might move from edge center to edge center — and have different levels of access authorization at each edge site.
There are technologies that track user identities and activities across IT networks. For central data center networks, identity access management software is used to track users. In the cloud, the same user tracking function is performed by cloud infrastructure entitlement management software. Unfortunately, these two solutions function independently of each other. To bring them all together under a single pane of glass, it’s necessary to use an umbrella software like identity governance and administration, which can provide an overarching framework.
The economics of restructuring
The concept of the data center is changing from that of a central glass house to a widely distributed IT umbrella that spans edge sites, clouds and the traditional data center. This is a data center restructuring that will also force IT to restructure how it deploys, maintains and secures IT assets.
For CIOs and data center managers, data center restructuring will trigger spending in areas like zero-trust networks and security — and on the application and IT infrastructure sides, we will see more containerization.
Collectively, these trends will force IT to adopt new modes of IT asset deployment, maintenance and security, since IT will still be expected to do it all.
