Toshiba Touts Itself as First Japanese Member of OpenFog Consortium

Toshiba became the first Japanese company to join the OpenFog Consortium, whose other members include Cisco, Dell, Intel, Microsoft and Princeton University’s Edge Laboratory, Toshiba said in a Thursday announcement. The consortium “brings together key players” in the IoT “ecosystem” to promote the deployment of “fog computing,” Toshiba said. It defined fog computing as a “paradigm for expanding cloud computing” to enable the creation of storage and network services between devices and cloud data centers “in a highly virtualized manner.” OpenFog “works to accelerate innovation and industry growth through new business models and applications enabled by an open fog-based architecture,” Toshiba said. “The OpenFog architecture brings seamless intelligence from the cloud to IoT endpoints using an open standardized approach.” IoT’s “prevalence” has made it possible to monitor and control many types of devices over the cloud, Toshiba said. “The cloud receives and analyzes data to provide visualized information for use in prediction, efficiency optimization, downtime reduction, and performance improvement,” it said. “Companies also expect to add new functions to the IoT devices. All of these factors increase network traffic and pose a challenge to fast data.”