Data as a smart superstructure: a warning to the wise
In “Identity and the smart city,” I wrote about how we need to build a smart identity for a smart city. The article, hopefully, pointed to building a perspective on what smart actually means.
But, smart cities are built up from many smart pieces. These smart pieces are really just an evolution of our current critical infrastructures (CI).
The U.S. government has named 16 essential sectors that come under the heading of critical infrastructure – including transportation, energy, healthcare, and water.
We are currently living through a movement from once disconnected and distinct sets of CIs, to highly connected entities. Each area of CI, each sector in the smart city, will be directly, or indirectly linked. And, the glue that binds them is data.
I believe that because of the criticality of data within the context of a smart city, perhaps data should be viewed as a critical infrastructure in its own right and even given ‘superstructure status’.
Critical infrastructures are like the gold at the end of the rainbow for cybercriminals and hacktivists. Hit a CI, then sit back and watch the repercussions roll in. This is what happened to the energy sector in Ukraine which was infected by the CrashOverridemalwaredesigned to attack substation automation technologies. The lights went out for an hour only, this time; but as we all know, cybercriminals like to play with us and test the water.
Imagine the action of a similar mindset within a hyperconnected infrastructure based on data. It would be like children in a sweet shop.
The smart city has to use data to make it work better.
In doing so, smart cities have to connect up the underlying CIs in a collaborative feedback matrix of data sharing, analysis, and optimization of services. This is a positive and vital move forward in a world that is rapidly changing. But in doing so, we are opening up massive holes in those infrastructures. An attack on the data superstructure may well bring down, not just one area of a CI, but the entire city.
A smart city is only as smart as the data governance it has in place.
