Cybersecurity for Smart Cities: Challenges, Risks, and Security Best Practices

Smart cities have become a reality today, with governments, businesses, and residents, making use of advanced technology to increase productivity and efficiency at home and the workplace and make lives better. However, the challenges to ensuring safety, security, and data privacy have risen proportionately, leading to the requirement for a unique cybersecurity model for smart cities.

A city using advanced technology infrastructure and other cutting-edge solutions to improve its operational efficiency, provide better services, and improve the lives of its citizens qualifies as a smart city. The technology ecosystem often consists of ICT (Information and communication technology),  IoT (Internet of Things), AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning), Blockchain, Cloud computing, etc. However, using the latest technologies has its challenges of cybersecurity risks, compromising the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of PII (Personally Identifiable Information) of its citizens. Below is a closer look into cybersecurity risks in smart cities, their challenges, the threats they are exposed to, and the potential solutions to overcome such hurdles.

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Smart Cities Using XR/AR

What are Smart Cities?

In recent years, we see more and more smart cities emerging and governments competing over building the next great smart city. In turn, the country behind the city gains immense publicity, popularity and potential tourism revenue in part due to its enormous benefits to infrastructure, public health, and technological bounds.

It is essential to understand the meaning of “Smart City” because many people use the term interchangeably, which challenges its actual meaning. A smart city uses digital technologies to make cities more resilient, sustainable, adaptive and environmentally inclusive.
However, it is crucial to understand that a smart city is not merely the use of digital technologies; instead, it is an entirely new concept that transforms urban landscapes completely.

This article will explore augmented reality (AR) and extended reality (XR) technology in smart cities to understand how these technologies improve the smart city’s functions from transportation, infrastructure, building systems and more. In addition, these technologies enhance the city’s administrative management to make citizens’ lives smarter.

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OKRs Role in Strategic Management

Organizational goals and objectives are often divided by a thin line of what they want to achieve and what they can actually accomplish given their resources. Apart from effective communication and micromanagement techniques, companies have to set goals to motivate their workforce and other stakeholders to work towards that common objective. Companies struggle to develop a measurable, consistent, and predictable business model, which impacts their decision-making in one way or another. This is where OKRs, an acronym that stands for Objectives and Key Results, come in handy to help managers enhance their teams’ performance and productivity.

We see this becoming more and more apparent post-covid 19 outbreak (20′, 21′) and the transition from workplace management to remote management and an increased necessity in employee trust, transparency and measuring KPIs that matter.

OKRs is increasingly becoming a powerful strategic management tool for businesses. Several reputable international companies have adopted it, including Google, Intel, BMW, Oracle, Twitter, Disney, Facebook, and Dropbox (Post 2019, par 51). Although OKRs are not the sole reason for these organizations’ success, they have been of significant value and helped to redefine organizational management. Thus these companies continue to implement OKRs up to today despite having thousands of workers. OKRs have several benefits as they help provide a clear direction, effective communication strategy, accountability, and strategic alignment and enable managers to track their objectives and outcomes. This paper will examine how Objectives and Key Results support strategic management, thereby improving an organization’s effectiveness and performance.

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