Fog Computing

Fog computing is a term created by Cisco that refers to extending cloud computing to the edge of an enterprise's network. In a fog computing environment, much of the processing takes place in a data hub on a smart mobile device or the edge of the network in a smart router or other gateway devices.

Cisco introduced its fog computing vision in January 2014 as a way of bringing cloud computing capabilities to the edge of the network and as a result, closer to the rapidly growing number of connected devices and applications that consume cloud services and generate increasingly massive amounts of data. The goal of fogging is to improve efficiency and reduce the amount of data that needs to be transported to the cloud for data processing, analysis and storage. This is often done for efficiency reasons, but it may also be carried out for security and compliance reasons. In a fog computing environment, much of the processing takes place in a data hub on a smart mobile device or on the edge of the network in a smart router or other gateway device. This distributed approach is growing in popularity because of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the immense amount of data that sensors generate.