Smart City applications such as street lighting, smart parking, and road traffic management are starting to be widely deployed around the world, bringing benefits to city operations, improving quality of life, reducing costs and energy use, and improving customer service. These services tend to be deployed as stand-alone applications, but the full benefits of a Smart City will only be realized if these applications are able to share data, enabling cross-department processes, and making city operations transparent across many groups.
In addition, many cities are growing rapidly and need to be certain that these applications can be extended and expanded as required, meaning a future-proof IT strategy is essential. And because physical location is no longer a determining factor in IT infrastructure management, cloud solutions are likely to be the logical next step.
