The United Nations has projected that 66% of the world’s population will be living in urban cities by 2050 with Asia being a major driving force behind this phenomenon. In 1950, only 17% of the Asian population lived in urban areas. By 2030, more than 55% of the population will be urban. This amounts to an increase of the total urban population in Asia from 232 million people to 2.7 billion2. It is estimated that by 2050, India’s urban population will reach up to 814 million.
Today, Asia is already home to some of the largest cities in the world: Tokyo – 38 million inhabitants, Delhi – 25 million inhabitants, Shanghai – 23 million inhabitants, and Mumbai – 21 million inhabitants. With the unprecedented growth in urbanization, governments are under constant pressure to develop infrastructure and implement policies that can lead the way towards economically, socially and environmentally sustainable societies.
Technology has been the cornerstone in aiding country leaders towards this admittedly lofty goal and India is one of them. In fact, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Government launched its 100 Smart Cities initiative in 2014. Earlier in this year The Union Cabinet approved the government’s 100 smart cities project, with an investment of $1.2 billion.
But what is a smart city? It is a question that both the public and private sectors have been grappling to answer, especially within the past five years. A broad definition of a smart city refers to a metropolitan area that uses technology to make life better for its residents. Digging deeper, Frost & Sullivan surmises that smart cities will be measured on the level of intelligence and integration of infrastructure connecting sectors of healthcare, energy, buildings, transportation and governance3.
Regardless of definition, most experts agree that there will be a marked increase in the number of data-generating devices and applications – surveillance cameras, sensors, location-based apps and services – that collect information from and about the metropolis to give its leaders a pulse of the city to help them determine if implementation or policy changes are required.
Storing and Using the Internet of Things
Smart city initiatives worldwide are increasingly focused on the Internet of Things, or IoT, and local governments are competing to build innovative and sustainable cities with it. In fact, IDC says that local governments will represent more than 25% of all government external spending to deploy, manage, and realize the business value of the IoT by 20184.
What does the IoT look like? Take video surveillance for example – that can automatically transmit information about a traffic hazard to another system, which can then instantaneously advise drivers in the area to take an alternate route. Other connected transportation systems (rail, subway, air) within a city or region, even nationally, can also adjust and improve their efficiency accordingly, and benefit from an orderly system of instantaneously transmitted machine-to-machine transactions that helps the public move around smoothly.
From sensors that monitor building access and security and fire detection, to sensors that monitor environmental conditions and energy consumption, to a variety of other network-connected monitoring applications, it is easy to see how the growth of this technology area will continue to increase.
At the same time, the amount of unstructured data will grow even as budgets for storage technology remain tight in many governments. Governments will need storage setups that can preserve data for the long haul while also providing government employees and citizens with rapid access and performance.
Storage solutions like the Seagate Surveillance HDD, which has a 1 million hour MTBF, (mean time between failures) allows hard drives to be kept in the field longer while reducing the cost of field deployment. Simultaneously, self-encrypting drives for enterprises and end-users are helping save time and money, while meeting their security requirements.
A bank in India was facing issues with its ATM digital video recorders (DVRs) due to data loss and video capture issues. This was leading to a high amount of downtime for the ATMs, leading to customer frustration especially in remote locations where there were fewer ATM. Installing such Seagate Surveillance HDD in the ATM DVRs, decreased the downtime of ATMs by almost 80%, ultimately reducing the bank’s operating costs.
Some estimates have machine-to-machine data transactions eventually making up 50% of all data transmitted over the Internet. And with total storage demands soon breaching the exabyte range over the next 10 years, governments are looking for partners that can help tackle these challenges. Organizations with an expertise in storage solutions can help governments build smarter cities. Such organizations help private and public sector firms to manage the explosive growth in data to create new information assets.
Ultimately, a smart city is only as effective as the data it has, and it is imperative to help cities tackle their long-term data challenges.
By Rex Dong, Managing Director, Asia Sales and Marketing, Seagate Technology
