Four infrastructure considerations capable of making smart cities “smarter” and more resilient

With the passage of the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, much-needed funds are starting to trickle down to states and cities. But how will localities spend their share?

While our nation’s roads, bridges, and highways need attention, the legislation also offers new opportunities for state and local agencies to lay the infrastructure of the future. And with two-thirds of the world’s population expected to live in cities by 2050, smart cities are a top priority.

However, the technologies enabling smart cities—including the internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and drones—are only as good as the infrastructure they run on. Cities will need wired and wireless networks to handle the massive amount of data sensors will generate. In addition, those networks must be secure, redundant, and resilient. And because state and local IT resources are finite, they must also be autonomous.

How can this modernized infrastructure be realized? Let’s look at four key areas underpinning smart cities capable of helping agencies prepare for the future.

1.AIOps: The next big thing in networking
Smart cities depend on a complex network of interconnected devices and sensors. Keeping an eye on what’s working and what’s not is an unenviable task. But instead of throwing more resources at the problem, imagine a network capable of predicting data bottlenecks or security issues before they occur. This is the premise and promise of applying artificial intelligence to IT operations (AIOps).

Powered by AI and machine learning, AIOps automates the previously cumbersome task of collecting and analyzing application data, logs and metrics. With this insight, operations teams can anticipate network issues, detect anomalies and gain the context needed to proactively fix issues—before performance is impacted.

For instance, if the connection drops between a highway congestion sensor and a smart traffic light, AIOps removes the human intervention needed to figure out what went wrong. Pulling masses of data from across the network, AIOps can quickly work out where the problem lies and identify a fix before the city slows to a crawl.

AIOps also continuously learns about the changing network environment and remediation actions taken by network engineers, and it uses these observations to inform and trigger automated mitigation workflows—all with minimal user effort. This improves mean time to repair (MTTR) and ensures a more resilient, autonomous network.

Ultimately, AIOps moves beyond traditional infrastructure monitoring to provide complete observability across smart city architectures. This visibility is key to building resilient systems, driving operational efficiencies, and delivering the best possible citizen experience.

2. Keeping smart devices safe from cyberattacks
Smart city networks pose a unique challenge to IT and security professionals. Every second, hundreds of thousands of sensors connect to larger networks and—if breached—open the door to potentially city-wide outages.

It’s a problem compounded by a lack of enforced security standards or code of practice for IoT devices, which are often considered easy pickings for hackers. The first half of 2021 saw an astonishing 1.5 billion attacks on IoT devices.

One effective way of bolstering smart city defenses is through network segmentation. If a breach occurs on a mission-critical sensor within a segmented network, it’s easily contained. This can mean the difference between a small fabric of the network infrastructure experiencing an incident and a full-scale catastrophe.

3. Addressing connectivity deserts
High-bandwidth connectivity is the bedrock of smart cities. Fiber makes this a reality, but to ensure seamless coverage across the vast ecosystem of connected devices, cities must invest in fault-tolerant wireless technologies like 5G and (eventually) 6G, especially in rural areas without fiber infrastructure.

Furthermore, knowing more and more IoT devices will come online, IPv6-based networks with their virtually unlimited IP address capability must be deployed as the de facto internet protocol to support smart cities as they scale.

4. Standards, standards, standards
Ideally, each of the technologies smart cities deploy should be based on industry standards. Unfortunately, this is not yet the case.

Just as regulations have yet to secure the IoT wild west, standardization in the development of APIs—the technology ensuring connected devices can talk to each other—is lacking. According to the latest State of API Report, 58 percent of organizations list standardization as a top challenge.

Why do API standards matter? When manufacturers incorporate standardized APIs into their design process, the learning curve for developers who build smart city applications is minimized. Standardization also allows for greater security, a smooth end-user experience, improved visibility into performance, and resiliency in times of peak demand.

Without the presence of consistent, uniform API standards across the smart city vendor ecosystem, planners and IT teams should ask their vendors about the API protocols they observe (specifically, security controls) and API management platforms they use.

Cities and citizens depend on infrastructure that “just works”
Smart cities have been around for decades. However, due to financial and infrastructure constraints, implementation has been siloed and slow-moving. But with historic levels of funding on its way, city officials should seize the moment and prepare for the future. To ensure smart cities proliferate and are successful, they must invest in autonomous, secure, scalable, fail-safe infrastructure—infrastructure that, like a utility, “just works.”

Brandon Shopp is the group vice president of product at SolarWinds. Shopp has spent more than 10 years with SolarWinds and has a proven success record in product delivery and revenue growth, with a wide variety of software product, business model, M&A and go-to-market strategies experience.