When it comes to the new possibilities brought about by artificial intelligence and advanced analysis, the concept of "smart city" can hardly be surpassed in capturing our collective imagination. In essence, the promise of a smart city is that the whole city can improve the provision of its basic public services, such as transportation, maintenance and health, through the use of artificial intelligence and advanced analysis.
Smart cities will permeate every aspect of our daily life. Whether it is improving traffic flow, garbage collection, or public maintenance of smart cities, it will ensure a safer, cleaner and more affordable urban center, and maximize the service and budget. However, to realize the potential of smart cities, IT teams of local and national governments need to review their network and cloud storage methods in order to effectively build for the future.
Endless urban storage
In order to achieve this goal, smart cities will need extensive and in-depth data for their use. In order to provide predictive and customized solutions, it must provide continuous data from sensors, networked vehicles and machines providing public services. However, it is inevitable that all of these need to be stored. Although it may not need to store all relevant data at the same time, it is always possible to need historical data to help develop or train new AI, or use analysis dashboards to review performance.
This effectively stifles any idea of building a smart city on top of the traditional central enterprise data center. The geographical location of the central data center is far away from where data is generated and used, which will hinder attempts to provide fast or reliable services. On the contrary, smart cities need decentralized data storage. In this case, decentralization means that data from smart city devices, sensors and applications can be analyzed and processed locally before being stored in any central server.
The demand for scale also means that in order to achieve cost-effectiveness, smart cities also need bottomless holes, that is, the price of data per unit must be very low, so that there will be no problems when configuring and expanding smart city infrastructure. This enables public institutions to store all the data they need without running out of budgets or arbitrarily reducing the data pools required for operations.
IaaS and Smart City
Effective management of the data needs of smart cities also requires the use of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solutions. IaaS is an approach to IT infrastructure that seeks to ensure that end users only pay for the resources they actually use. In terms of storage, IaaS is critical to the realization of the vision of a smart city, because it allows teams to expand the scale of data use and only allocate taxpayers' money to used data.
IaaS can provide some critical things for the success of smart cities, such as management, on-demand and secure edge computing and storage services. Whether it is storage, network structure or virtualized environment, IaaS allows the team to expand supply according to current demand, while reducing the procurement and management burden of processing actual hardware.
On the contrary, by entrusting this work to a professional third party, local and national governments that hope to provide smart cities can benefit from economies of scale, which makes cloud computing so attractive. In addition, the market competition among IaaS suppliers encourages better services from all aspects, including security, which means IaaS is one of the most effective ways to reliably and securely deliver smart cities.
Make Smart City a Reality
The world's major cities are facing massive population growth, so their demand is soaring. In order to solve this problem, urban centers must optimize the use of resources to provide effective, fair and environmentally friendly services. Therefore, smart cities will become an important part of urban prosperity and livability in the 21st century.
However, smart cities need an intelligent cloud storage method. This requires a new look at the way cities handle cloud infrastructure to make it more scalable and efficient. This is why IaaS is critical to smart cities to address some of the most pressing challenges of this century.
