According to data released by the Government of India, over 63 per cent of the country’s GDP and over 80 per cent of tax revenues are generated from urban agglomerations. It is also estimated that 70 per cent of net new employment in India will be generated by cities by 2030. The ‘100 smart cities’ project is an initiative to help unshackle the economy from its sub 8 per cent growth rate and improve citizen’s lives in urban areas.
The objective of this ambitious project is to create sustainable economic development and high quality of life for citizens, by focusing on multiple key areas: economy, mobility, environment, people, standard of living, and governance. Excelling in these key areas demands not just strong human capital, or social capital, but also a robust and scalable Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure.
A city can be defined as 'smart' when investments in human capital and technology fuel sustainable economic development and a high quality of life, with a wise management of natural resources, through participatory action and engagement. The main features of a smart city include applications that connect, manage and optimise data from a complex set of devices, sensors, people and software, creating real-time, context-specific information intelligence and analytics, which aim to transform the urban environment and address its specific needs. For example, the city of Kansas has partnered with a leading IT player for their smart city platform on the cloud which is being used to create an open platform for innovation. Denmark is monitoring and addressing air quality issues using Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, cloud-based digital management systems and analytics.
Managing such enormous amounts of heterogeneous data requires, among others, high storage capacity and performance computing power. For this, the latest developments in cloud computing and IoT need to be widely deployed in smart cities.
More specifically, smart cities have to use a wide variety of ICT solutions to deal with urban problems and monitor their functions. Not only do they require the use of new technologies and devices, but also the capacity to manage and process all this large scale data (BigData) in real time, in an interconnected and service/application’s specific manner. The cloud facilitates big data storage, integration, visualisation, processing and analysis in acceptable time frames.
Presently, most of the IT-enabled citizen services are delivered through tightly coupled systems provided by domain-specific vendors. For example, spatial planning, transportation, and health care, among others have domain-specific application requirements that drive all system-component design and determine most technical choices, ranging from sensors and smart devices to middleware components and computing infrastructure. This model leads to many siloed systems with tightly coupled infrastructure and application logic. Scalability is essentially limited in such systems, and the closed relationships between stakeholders stifle the creation of new services.
Cloud technology addresses these limitations by offering internet-based service delivery that encourages the creation of novel services based on a domain-independent service-delivery platform. It helps government organisations share resources, avoid infrastructure costs and achieve economy of scale. Cloud infrastructure enhances agility, speed and cost savings by providing on-demand access, via a network, to an elastic pool of shared computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal service provider interaction and scaled as needed according to a pay-per-use paradigm.
Cloud solutions support both public and private deployment models allowing the project stakeholders to keep their applications on a public cloud or, alternatively, deploy services on equipment at their own sites, for fulfilling privacy and security requirements.
Final word
The demand for essential city-level services similar to Kansas and Denmark, will expand rapidly. Cloud computing is a hence a viable and scalable solution for implementing smart city services in the future. Stakeholders can take great advantage of the inherent delivery model that promotes agility, speed and cost savings. The cloud will also help leverage the power of citizen engagement which is critical to the success of the smart city initiative.
