20th century marks the presence of most technological advancement that we have ever seen, be it Big Data, AI, or ML. But the most exciting part is that cloud technologies directly or indirectly drive these technologies. The monetization of cloud goes back to 2003 when Amazon started its cloud services. Since then, cloud industry has been serving a plethora of use cases for enterprises. Cloud has presented new opportunities to use it in new innovative ways that can help masses. One such use case is for “Smart City.” CMI digs deeper to present you the anatomy of Smart City enabled
either entirely or a part of it by cloud technologies.
Infrastructure:
Home
IoT is innovating living spaces with smart solutions. Cloud technologies can provide better connectivity to run different tasks, sitting in comfort, with the help of an intelligent device.
Lighting
Device Controls
Electricity
Real-time monitoring can be done at residential or commercial buildings to ensure electricity is used efficiently and available everywhere.
Utilities:
Waste Management
Smart cities can only be smart if the waste output is minimum or that is not avoidable (as 100% efficiency is not possible). Tracking the input and output of the materials can help in managing the waste of the defined area with the right devices connected on cloud to perform real-time operations.
Environment:
Data Collection
Data is the new way to find the answers. Cloud is the new house of data. Smart cities equipped with devices can collect a plethora of data and send it to cloud and perform real-time operations to provide actionable insights.
Public:
Security
Controlling the crime and illegal activities in a city is the utmost priority by the city administration. These issues can be solved by implementing security in public places by collecting information about every individual. The real-time data can only be processed with fast internet with minimum infrastructure.
Facial Recognition + Individual Profile
Facial recognition and building individual profile of the residents and the individuals visiting the city can help in saving time in public places. The advanced facial Recognition can help in allowing entry and exit at public places in a fraction of second.
Profiling every individual that too by consent can be helpful by tracking the criminals as soon as possible.
5G+Cloud
Faster internet means better connectivity and secure mode of sharing information even if that information is loads of data. Currently, 5G companies are adopting cloud technologies to provide the internet with speed up to 200GB per second.
Driverless Cars
Perfect driverless cars are still a dream for most of us. Machines are just following orders based on the algorithms developers feed. In smart cities, if cars can be feed with enough real-time data to track every inch of road and every object on the road, then accidents will be reduced, and driverless cars will not be a dream.
Parking Meters
Smart cities can be equipped with devices that can update the spots available for parking. For devices like this, there is no need for human intervention, and cloud can help in processing and distributing the information with a blink of the eye.
Traffic Monitoring
Traffic is the most common problem striving in cities. To cop-up with this issue, real-time monitoring is necessary to feed in either to driverless cars or to devices handled by humans to help them navigate via another route to save time. Google Maps is already such service prevailing, which is run on Google Cloud Platform. This can be improved to a whole new level by providing real-time images via satellites or connecting cameras installed at different places in the city.
Miscellaneous:
Wearables
Residents or individuals visiting the city can be equipped with certain wearables to allow easy entry and exit at public places. The wearables can also help in collecting various information such as body data, the locations they are visiting, or even if the individual has to search for anything.