The Smart City Council defines a smart city as one that
“uses information and communications technology to enhance its livability, work-ability and sustainability.”

The creation of a smart city requires a complex ecosystem of partners that includes the government organizations and municipalities and the companies that control the underlying communications and technical infrastructure as well as those firms in the private sector capable of delivering the corresponding products and services.

This complex group of partners will face many challenges as it works diligently to find ways to collect, communicate and then analyze the data that will inform the improvement programs it initiates. The telecommunications architecture that will serve as the foundation of these efforts will need to be completely unified or converged – with a single set of standards that allows for consistent inter-operability among the networks, technologies and devices of all the partners.

Any group working towards a smart city implementation also faces massive data management issues, and frequently doesn’t or won’t have the skill sets required to analyze the data once they have it. Furthermore, all smart cities must protect the citizens and the city itself from privacy violations, hackers and even criminals.

The CAS Group is uniquely positioned to play an independent advisory role to these groups of partners to help them set their strategy, design their telecommunications architecture, carefully consider privacy and security implications and finally build a road-map to a smart city that carefully balances the desire to take advantage of new opportunities with the need to address existing challenges and prioritize the investment of limited funds.