One way public cloud might not work for local governments
The Smart Cities concept is one that many public sector bodies are involved in, both at a central and local government level. One recent report counted 363 UK smart cities procurement requests covering 32 technology categories in the six financial years from FY2015-16 to FY2020-21. While not all have been awarded, the report highlights the distributed nature of Smart Cities, covering a multitude of different fields. It is a state that is only likely to increase as a number of factors contribute to the accelerated development and deployment of Smart City solutions.
First, there is spiralling growth of urban living – based on current estimates, 66% of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050, which will have significant implications for public services. Second, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a disproportionate effect on urban populations, with higher rates of infection and greater strain on urban health provision. While the crisis has driven an increase in people looking to leave cities, many of those doing so fall into higher income brackets, with lower-income bracket inhabitants less able to move. As one article noted, “Nowhere have the failings of modern
society to cope with the global pandemic been more apparent than in urban contexts, where conventional ways of life have been unceremoniously brushed aside by the coronavirus”. If urban areas are to develop in a sustainable manner and ensure that technology provision benefits all inhabitants equally, then Smart City initiatives are going to be at the forefront of ensuring they are fit for purpose.
Local and central governments need to be able to deploy and manage these projects in an effective and efficient manner, however. Smart Cities generate a lot of data – Internet of Things sensors and devices embedded across urban areas will constantly gather information, which in turn needs to be processed, analysed and stored if valuable insights, the ‘Smart’ in Smart City, are to be generated. These sensors sit at the edge of networks. Public sector bodies have two choices – they can either transport the data back to centralised environments for processing, extraction and analysis, or much of the work can be done close to the device, with only the most important insights transmitted back to the centre of the network. For those that have already deployed public clouds, the former may make sense, particularly if they have already developed applications for the processing and analysis of data in the cloud. However, an application waiting for data is a lot cheaper to host in a cloud than one handling data. The hyperscaler providers managing public clouds do not operate on economies of scale – one user costs a 10,000th of 10,000 users, which means costs will rise proportionately as workload demands increase. There are also the network costs of constantly transmitting data back to a central point. The deployment of 5G will help speed up the transit of data from sensors to storage and analytics applications, promising more data, faster, which could simply speed up how much storing data in central public clouds costs public sector organisations. So, realistically, a purely public cloud deployment will not help local and central government bodies harness the insights they need in order to run successful Smart City initiatives. This is where a hybrid approach, which combines edge computing processing and actioning data on or near IoT devices alongside private and public clouds, could support public sector organisations in turning local urban areas into Smart Cities.
