The definition of of Smart City, varies from
city to city and country to country, depending on the level of development,
willingness to change and reform, resources and aspirations of the city
residents. A smart city would have a different standards according to geography and
technology as per the region and location.
Basically a smart city is a system that works with integration of emerging trends such as automation, machine learning and the internet of things (IoT) that configures the smart system in a certain geographic location adopting certain rules and regulation in facilitating various services and amenities.
To be precises, a smart city is a municipality or a societal form of city management system that uses information and communication
technologies to increase operational efficiency, share information with the
public and improves both the quality of government services and citizen welfare. It create better management overarching and improving quality of life for its citizens using
smart technology and data analysis.
In today's context of smart cities, energy conservation and efficiency are major priority where using smart sensors, and IoT devices are the need which is changing rapidly. Every year the standard of smart city is changing with the evolving technology and system. Likewise, smart grid technology can be used to improve
operations, maintenance and planning, and to supply power on demand and monitor
energy outages.
Focusing on Climate change and resource optimization, smart city initiatives also aim to address environmental concerns and other human threats. Using better technology, Health, Sanitation and hygiene can also be improved with smart technology. Similarly, daily necessity needs like food, water, gas can be efficiently control and distributed minimizing the risk of contamination.
Apart from that Smart city technology can be used for improving emergency preparedness with sensors that can save hundreds and thousands of lives from natural disaster like droughts, floods, landslides or hurricanes.
Smart city
challenges and concerns
The major challenges and concern are assumption of cyber attack, surveillance other infiltration to the system of centralized control which can disrupt the services and in major cases can cause devastation in terms of management.
Another aspect of the challenge is the fear of the exposure of the data that citizens produce on a daily basis to the risk of hacking or misuse is an issue of concern for all. Additionally, the presence of sensors and cameras may be perceived as an invasion of privacy or government surveillance. To address this, smart city data collected should be anonymized and not be personally identifiable information.
Another aspect of the challenge is the fear of the exposure of the data that citizens produce on a daily basis to the risk of hacking or misuse is an issue of concern for all. Additionally, the presence of sensors and cameras may be perceived as an invasion of privacy or government surveillance. To address this, smart city data collected should be anonymized and not be personally identifiable information.
One thing that is very important is when there is opportunity there are risks. This requires a firm backbone of critical infrastructures such as Computer Incident Response Team (CIRT) for management of the system and back up of the network.
The CIRT team is responsible for responding to security breaches, viruses and other potentially catastrophic incidents in enterprises that face significant security risks. In addition to technical specialists capable of dealing with specific threats, it should include experts who can guide enterprise executives on appropriate communication in the wake of such incidents. The CIRT normally operates in conjunction with other enterprise groups, such as site security, public-relations and disaster recovery teams.
Without a functional CIRT the operation and management of a smart city is impossible.
