Thursday, March 14, 2013
Smart cities could contribute to improved security
Max Burkhalter
Connected devices, advanced security cameras, sophisticated sensors and other technological tools can provide individuals managing them meaningful insight into exactly what is happening in a specific area. When these types of solutions are combined with advanced network functionality, data transmission in real time can help government organizations manage relatively large areas and protect them more intelligently.
According to a recent Frost & Sullivan study, advanced technologies that are integrated and connected to one another could play a key role in city defense and security moving forward.
Protecting urban areas with technology
Terrorism and natural disasters are among the greatest threats to urban areas in the United States, the report said, and technology could be the answer to minimizing the damages of such events. Similar issues are common around the world, and pricing represents a key problem. While there are many ways for cities to defend themselves and their residents, the high costs of supporting safety measures can be problematic in many areas. Moving forward, deploying technologies that improve visibility and management is key. Integrating various security solutions is important to control costs and provide the kind of insight into conditions with an area needed to improve security.
Krzysztof Rutkowski, defense research analyst for Frost & Sullivan, explained that finding the funding to handle large-scale physical projects can be extremely difficult. In most regions, people are more concerned about job and social security than they are about protection against major disasters. As a result, municipal governments often focus on economic issues to the neglect of physical security. Using integration and advanced connected technologies to protect residents in a cost-effective way is essential.
"To increase security and decrease cost, technology must be improved and modified," said Rutkowski. "The most important driver for safe cities is better resource utilization through the deployment/integration of technology."
Using networks to create safe cities
Connected and integrated devices are critical to safe city architectures. Because of this, high-performance and cost-efficient network components are also critical. Resilient and reliable fiber and copper cabling architectures can go a long way toward enabling this vision for intelligent and safe city management programs. Making this happen, however, depends heavily on being able to create interoperability between fiber and Ethernet systems, especially in relatively large urban areas where distance makes copper impractical even if it does meet performance demands. In such settings,media converters can go a long way toward enabling compatibility across the network while supporting advanced performance functionality.
Perle has an extensive range of Managed and Unmanaged Fiber Media Converters to extended copper-based Ethernet equipment over a fiber optic link, multimode to multimode and multimode to single mode fiber up to 160km.