We have seen a decade of consolidation of the data centre industry with larger and larger data centres being built in clusters around London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris and now more and more, Dublin. This centralised approach is dominated by big colocation companies such as Equinix and Interxion and by Cloud providers such as Amazon, IBM and Microsoft. The downsides of centralisation, as in any business, are reliability, costs (if your customers are very distributed) and network latency, i.e. the delay caused by long communications links between computers and networking equipment.If you have a lot of users storing and processing data in an area remote from the traditional centres of cloud providers then it makes sense to build a smaller datacentre nearer to the customers, hence the rise (or resurgence) of the Edge data centre.