To Protect Consumer Data, Don’t Do Everything on the Cloud

As companies store more and more consumer data, they’re increasingly at risk of embarrassing — and even deeply damaging — breaches by hackers. But what if they could glean useful insights without hoarding every scrap of data? Edge computing, in which data is processed locally on hardware instead of on the cloud, can help them do just that by implementing three critical design choices. The design choices begin with how to think about data collection and extend to the actual data processing. They are: 1) sufficiency, or a focus on only must-have data; 2) aggregation, or lumping data together to produce group insights; and 3) alteration, or making minor changes to the data to hide an individual’s identity while minimally impacting the accuracy of insights.