Deploy Smart City Technology for a Smarter, Safer, More Connected Tomorrow

What makes a city smart? “Generally, it requires intelligent IoT solutions that optimize infrastructure and government to better engage citizens in the management of services,” according to John Kosowatz, senior editor for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). 

The ASME names its “Top 10 Growing Smart Cities” annually, measuring things like how residents move through and around cities, and how cities provide energy, water, sanitation, and other basic needs. This year, two American cities made it onto the society’s list – Boston at five and New York at seven. 

Boston received high marks for its master plan centers on citizen participation, enabling citizens to receive parking information, report service issues, or communicate with each other via cellphone apps. Users can do things like report potholes or graffiti from anywhere or track a child’s school bus. New York was applauded for launching a pilot program that placed hundreds of smart sensors and a low-power wide-area network throughout several business districts. Collected data helps manage trash pickup; waste containers fitted with sensors monitor when the cans are full and relay that information to disposal crews. 

This is pretty cool stuff – and very attainable for cities committed to deploying smart city technology. According to Eagle Eye Networks latest whitepaper, “Smart Cities: Connected Cities, Secure Cities,” the primary objective for smart city initiatives is to intelligently use data and technology to make everyday life easier and better for the people who live in, work in, and visit the city – while making innovative and efficient use of resources.”

The whitepaper outlines 11 key requirements of smart city technology initiatives. Here’s a snapshot of a few of these essentials: 

1. Intelligent Connectivity – City leaders must develop a sound networking plan for any proposed project, verifying the infrastructure capabilities and documenting the planned intelligent use of existing network infrastructure and any new infrastructure to be added as part of the project.
2. Simple Scalability – Explore the future vision of the smart city infrastructure and document how the modern solution being proposed will satisfy current needs and also be both expandable and manageable for future growth.
3. Device and System Inter­op­er­ability – Ensure the immediate interoperability requirements have all been identified. Work out and document how they will be addressed by current product capabilities or near-term vendor roadmap items.
4. Open Systems Architecture – Don’t just conform to smart city planning, but contribute to it – especially for strategic infrastructure design and elevating citizen and visitor experiences.
5. Data Governance – Fully understand the smart city data governance plan, and the directions in which it is evolving. Provide a privacy, cybersecurity, and data governance plan for the security technology deployment that shows how the city’s requirements will be met or exceeded.
6. Actionable Data and Analytics – Security technology service providers should consider the many opportunities that are appropriate for a city seeking to improve the smart city venue experiences.   
7. Future-Readiness – Future-readiness includes engineering the means for current deployments to accommodate planned and likely future integrations with support for or provision of smart city infrastructure expansion and advanced application capabilities.

Download our whitepaper, “Smart Cities: Cloud Video for Connected, Secure Cities,” for an in-depth look into today’s smart cities. Our paper takes a deep dive into smart city success stories, smart applications, public use, key technology requirements, and smart city engineering and architecture. And, download our recorded webinar, “Smart Cities: Turning Strategic Vision into Reality,” Wednesday, October 28 at 9 a.m. CT.