Today, more than half of the world’s population—about 4 billion people—live in cities. Within the next 30 years, this number is expected to grow by another 2.5 billion people. This influx will increase the burden on urban planners to build working cities, and it will increase the pressure on state and local governments to deliver services to citizens. Cities are looking to the internet of things (IoT) to lessen these burdens, creating connected, efficient, and sustainable smart cities.
“Smart cities are changing the way we live,” said Brandon Shopp, SolarWinds VP of product strategy. “Using technology, cities can increase the speed and efficiency of urban services and development, providing cleaner, safer living spaces for residents.”
Spending on smart cities is estimated to reach US$158 billion by 2022, according to the IDC. These funds will improve safety, transportation, health, and the environment. “There is an abundance of IoT opportunities within cities,” said Shopp. “Public safety, connected vehicles, drones, and smart utilities are just a few. But governments should be prepared to tackle the data that accompanies these connected devices.”
With thousands of connections throughout smart cities, data storage, management, analysis, and security will be vital. “All of these services now become a potential attack vector,” said Merritt Maxim, an analyst with Forrester, at the recent RSA Conference. “And the challenge for an IT organization is, each of these new services is now generating more events that have to be evaluated to determine if this is truly anomalous activity or is this just a factor of, ‘it’s a rainy day and therefore people are behaving differently.’ And so, it creates a much bigger challenge for the IT organization to be able to sift through this data to really understand, ‘is an attack underway, or is this just unusual behavior among the citizens because of some other external factors?’”
Real-time crime mapping, gunshot detection, smart roads, automated vehicles, and smart irrigation are just a few smart city technologies playing into the attack vector. “We talked with some cities last year… the amount of ‘security events’ that get generated is in the tens of millions a day,” explained Maxim. “And that can be everything from a bus to a transit system to healthcare, and in just sifting through all that, it becomes a real challenge to understand, ‘how do I prioritize the ones that really need further investigation?’ And that’s where AI and machine learning and analytics play a role in helping you sift through and prioritize those large data sets to find the most relevant examples.”
Governments implementing IoT devices and taking steps toward smart solutions must invest in technology capable of enabling a secure, uninterrupted experience to constituents. “The promise of innovation through smart cities can become a reality with the right data solutions,” Shopp concluded.
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