Page 61 - Cyber Defense eMagazine for July 2020

• By then, our global cities may be cranking out up to 180 zettabytes of data.
• In terms of energy production, The World Bank reports that our urban meccas already gobble up
to 80 percent of its worldwide.
• Over the next decade, cities will likely be responsible for close to three-quarters (74 percent) of
global greenhouse gases, up from around two-thirds, or 67 percent, currently.

Adding Predictability with Smart Edge Devices

It can feel overwhelming to consider the vast scope of the challenges that face today’s cities. Cities are
charged with managing an ever-expanding laundry list of problems, including transportation, water and
energy, public health, infrastructure, public safety, waste reduction, and more. As the current global
pandemic and COVID-19 are showing, the high population and density of cities can quickly turn them
into a hotbed of issues that require the best that technology can offer to aid communication and mitigate
complexities.

To that end, studies have proven the value of edge computing and smart IoT edge devices, particularly
when it comes to smart cities. A comprehensive survey on “Edge Computing Enabled Smart Cities” by
Khan et al for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) stated that “it is evident from
literature that IoT is an integral part of smart cities. The next step is enabling the resource intensive and
strict latency IoT based smart city applications. Edge computing provides a promising way of enabling
these applications by offering computation and storage resources with low latency.”

However, metropolises still have a significant issue to figure out—security—when leveraging the power
of edge computing in smart cities. How can our global municipalities offer secure connectivity from their
datacenters (as well as from the cloud) to the edge? The answer lies in the secure environment provided
by software-defined perimeter (SDP) technology.

Safeguarding the Edge

SDP software provides the needed security for smart IoT edge devices by creating a “zero trust”
environment. This means edge devices don’t have full network access, but instead can only access the
exact applications that the city’s IT department has authorized them to see, whether in the cloud or
datacenter.

In other words, SDP allows for access at the application level only, not at the network level. As a result,
lateral attacks are no longer a thing, and smart cities can enjoy the “secure by default” architecture that
they require.

Here’s how SDP solutions work to help create secure, hyperconnected smart cities:

Cyber Defense eMagazine –July 2020 Edition 61
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