Edge computing has the potential to transform industries ranging from agriculture to industrial manufacturing and health care with its ability to offer real-time data analysis and insight from billions of devices in the field, says Microsoft Corp. Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott.

There’s so much opportunity with the new architecture, he says, that he wishes he was still a developer. “There’s a whole class of things that we’re able to do with the intelligent edge that were economically infeasible or outright impossible before,” he said.

In edge computing, data is processed and analyzed on or near the device where it’s generated instead of first being sent to a corporate cloud or data center. This way, devices ranging from drones to elevators, factory machines and self-driving cars can compute and analyze data in real-time without always relying on connectivity to a corporate cloud.

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott Photo: Microsoft Corp.

Microsoft announced in April it would invest $5 billion in Internet of Things-related technologies — of which edge computing is a major component. There will be an estimated 25.1 billion devices connected to the internet by 2021, up from 6.3 billion in 2016, according to recent research from Gartner Inc.

One sector that stands to benefit immensely from edge computing is agriculture, Mr. Scott said. Farmers usually have to perform manual inspections of hundreds or thousands of acres of crops to assess which areas of soil are underperforming and in need of more or less water or chemical spray. Computing resources have historically been cost prohibitive, especially in remote areas where connectivity is unreliable.

“You figure these things out by marching people through fields and having them do things the hard way, which means the rate at which you can get information is slow, and the notion that you can do things in precise ways is sort of unimaginable,” Mr. Scott said.

Some farmers, though, are now experimenting with a new architecture using Microsoft services in which data about soil moisture and pests, for example, is gathered from sensors and cameras in the field and then analyzed with machine-learning algorithms located on or near the farm, the edge of the network.

In this way, edge computing offers farmers real-time information about their crops and soil that saves them from spending hours or days trying to detect problems manually. The technology could ultimately improve the success rate of certain crops, Mr. Scott says.

In many edge computing scenarios, a piece of hardware called a gateway is located physically near the device. The gateway aggregates information from sensors, analyzes it with software, and pushes insights and data to a corporate cloud, only when necessary. In other scenarios, servers and software form an “edge cloud” near the device itself.

In 2017, Schneider Electric SE began experimenting with Microsoft Corp.’s Azure IoT Edge, which connects devices in the field to gateway hardware that is an extension of its public cloud. Schneider is using the service to predict costly mechanical problems with rod pumps, which extract oil in remote locations where wireless connectivity isn’t widely available.

“Any of these agricultural or industrial applications, where you have very manual processes like inspections, or humans gathering data … (that’s where) the intelligent edge is going to make those industries massively more efficient,” Mr. Scott said.

In recent years, advancements have been made in the quality and affordability of sensors as well as the cloud-based platforms required to gather and analyze data being streamed from devices in the field. But challenges still remain before edge computing becomes widespread, Mr. Scott said.

One of those challenges involves figuring out how to keep track of the connected devices that are responsible for generating data in edge computing schemes, and make sure they’re securely handling that data. “We’re striving to help give administrators and developers tools where they can build solutions that are end-to-end secure,” he said.

Microsoft also is coming up with easier ways for enterprise software developers and engineers to integrate sensors, AI algorithms and edge computing into their already existing IT environments, so they can come up with new ways to make use of real-time data streams, Mr. Scott said.

“It’s going to be so fun from a developer perspective that it’s going to make me regret I’m not 20 years younger in my day-to-day hacking mode,” he said. “It’s a really cool new frontier.”