According to Serverfarm CEO Avner Papouchado, not enough is being done by administrations to develop a
smart city infrastructure which will ensure longevity and reliability, and he is calling for heavy investment in edge computing, which should not be reliant on legacy systems.
It’s no secret that the concept of Smart Cities has been around for some time, but now, with the population of urban areas increasing year-on-year, the call for a future-proof investment into the technologies on which Smart City infrastructure will be based is becoming more and more widespread.
“In order to implement smart cities and make them a reality, organisations are going to have to invest heavily in effective edge computing that does not have to back haul to the current infrastructure,” Papouchado explained. “At this time much of the connectivity is broad. It sweeps from major points of big compute and infrastructure such as New York or Chicago.”
“This will create bottle necks of data for cities in other locations who are trying to collect information on their own foot and vehicle traffic and other connected services.”
Serverfarm comprises a series of sophisticated data centres across America and stretching to London, and Avner Papouchado has been the guiding force behind ServerFarm since its inception. Known for his intense business acumen, Papouchado has a proven track record of successful real estate investments and has served as Red Sea Group’s North American CEO since 1993. Notably, he is an active member of the executive management team responsible for the company’s worldwide investment strategy.
He goes on to explain that, in his opinion, smart cities should “be based locally and much smaller than these massive compute centres”.
“Governments will need to partner with forward thinking private sector organisations in order to build the systems to support these future workloads.”
“The reality is that if governments do not invest now in future technology that we know is coming, they will fall far behind some of the basic infrastructure requirements that we already know are needed.”
“This will create a financial burden on the cities who are not working with the private sector now to prepare for the future.”
Source: information-age.com