THE CLOUD IS BECOMING MORE COMPLEX AS TWO MAJOR TRENDS – HYBRID CLOUD AND ANYTHING AS A SERVICE ( XAAS ) – GATHER SPEED .

What is the distributed cloud ? It all comes down to location . Historically , this hasn ’ t mattered much . The cloud , by its very name and nature , was ‘ elsewhere ’. But the advent of XaaS has brought speed of service to the fore . Distributed cloud can be thought of as a combination of public cloud , hybrid cloud and edge computing .

What ’ s the advantage of distributed cloud ? The central advantage is one of speed ( low latency ). In fact , in many instances edge and distributed cloud may be conflated . But edge does not offer the same resilience as a hybrid strategy . Localising the things that need to work fast , and distributing the rest to cloud ‘ substations ’ offers an overall improvement in efficiency and productivity . There ’ s also increased compliance and a broader surface of cloud options for distinct business tasks .

� STRIPE Stripe became the US ’ s most valuable startup following a $ 600mn funding round which took its valuation to a high of $ 95mn

� VOLKSWAGEN Announcing it would build six battery

gigafactories , Volkswagen put Tesla in its sights with a comprehensive push for electric vehicles .

� APPLE Apple announced a $ 1bn European Silicon Design Centre bolstering its German engineering and design base

� UBER The company said it would treat its “ drivers ” as workers under UK law following a decision by the Supreme Court

� TENCENT Amid fears of incoming regulation from the Chinese state , Tencent experienced a rapid fall in its share price .

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