As enterprises push further into distributed compute, real-time services, and cloud-adjacent architectures, edge-native data centres are expanding at an extraordinary pace.
With the global edge market forecast to hit US$317 billion by 2026 and Gartner predicting that 75 percent of all data will be generated outside traditional clouds this year, momentum is clearly accelerating. Yet the regional and architectural foundations required for a truly mature edge remain uneven.
In conversation with iTNews Asia, Lalit S. Chowdhary, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at Lightstorm, outlined the technical, operational and regulatory constraints that continue to limit scalable edge deployments, especially across the highly fragmented Asia- Pacific (APAC) region.
Chowdhary points first to the underlying scalability constraints shaping the region. He notes that although APAC is on track to account for “40 percent of the world’s data centre capacity,” the region’s connectivity fabric remains a major obstacle, adding pressure to existing challenges such as land availability, energy limitations, cooling inefficiencies and a persistent skills shortage.
Even with ongoing subsea cable expansion, he said the region still suffers from last-mile peering gaps, cross-border latency inefficiencies and insufficient interconnect density.
NaaS gains traction but has limitations
Chowdhary acknowledged the agility and on-demand provisioning benefits of Network as a Service (NaaS), but stresses that today’s implementations are not yet engineered for the most demanding enterprise environments.
“Current models operate on shared infrastructure with abstracted control layers,” he said, reducing an enterprise’s ability to maintain visibility or enforce strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs) around latency and path diversity.
Multi-country routing makes data residency and compliance even more problematic, while bespoke or hybrid topologies often cannot be replicated cleanly across multi-vendor ecosystems. Integration friction with legacy infrastructure and inconsistent APIs further undermines the ‘as-a-Service’ promise of NaaS, he explained.
Chowdhary believes that as observability improves, regional point of presence (PoP) density increases and SLA enforcement tightens, NaaS will evolve into a strong complement and eventually an alternative to traditional enterprise networking.
Edge-Native architecture
Despite the edge’s accelerating growth, Chowdhary said that a truly edge-native architecture is still several years away. Market expansion alone cannot compensate for the architectural gaps that persist across the ecosystem.
While network density and latency are well-recognised hurdles, he stressed that the industry tends to underestimate the quieter but equally critical obstacles such as distributed security governance, multi-jurisdiction compliance, operational complexity and the lack of robust standardisation.
These issues, he said, must be addressed alongside physical build-outs for the edge to scale sustainably.
When evaluating the requirements for successful deployments, Chowdhary highlighted ecosystem readiness as the most overlooked factor. While industry conversations often revolve around fibre, power and latency, the real determinant of scalable deployment sits behind the curtain.
Ecosystem readiness involves aligning operational processes, APIs, security models, orchestration platforms and commercial frameworks across multiple players. Even with the right fibre or the right power, low readiness levels across operators and enterprise teams can stall deployments at scale.
- Lalit S. Chowdhary, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Lightstorm
Chowdhary described the edge ecosystem as evolving in two directions simultaneously. The influx of telcos, hyperscalers, CDNs and cloud providers has created a more fragmented, multi-operator environment. Yet industry-wide efforts around open APIs, standardisation and interoperable interconnects are driving countervailing convergence.
He added that enterprises must architect for distributed execution while preserving centralised orchestration and intent-based networking to manage the rising complexity.
Neutrality and interoperability are now becoming strategic
Chowdhary further said, carrier and cloud neutrality, once seen primarily through a regulatory lens, has now become indispensable to operational resilience in APAC’s multi-cloud and multi-network environments. Neutral architectures preserve performance consistency, sovereignty alignment and multi-path redundancy while avoiding vendor lock-in.
“It’s no longer a regulatory checkbox, but a strategic enabler of agility and resilience.” He also warns of recent industry consolidation risks: fewer dominant players may re-centralise control, eroding flexibility. The rise of neo-cloud and open-edge providers offers counterbalance, but enterprises must insist on vendor-agnostic, programmable infrastructure to retain autonomy.
The next frontier
Looking ahead, Chowdhary sees the next wave of evolution occurring at the intersection of programmability, AI and automation. He expects API-driven and AI-assisted networks to define the next frontier, enabling self-serve provisioning, predictive performance monitoring, automated remediation and intent-based optimisation.
Growth is not the issue but the industry is expanding edge capacity at extraordinary speed. The challenge is architectural uniformity, ecosystem alignment and regulatory coherence, he said.
“Edge-native capabilities like dense interconnect fabrics, distributed security governance, standardised orchestration and consistent operational models are still maturing. Until these foundational layers catch up, the promise of a fully real-time, automated, low-latency edge architecture will remain out of reach,” he added
