Page 455 - Shaping smarter and more sustainable cities - Striving for sustainable development goals

 Balancing traditional versus cloud delivery

Within a SSC environment, all the smart services mentioned so far in the analysis can be delivered
through a traditional client‐server approach, but also through a cloud computing model, both
private and hybrid, in order to leverage “as‐a‐service” capabilities and efficiencies.

These models require a secure virtualized environment where data can be safely guarded and
processed with appropriate service level agreements (SLAs) in order to guarantee the provision of
essential services to citizens. Authentication and encryption policies and techniques can help ensure
the integrity of the cloud environment and its safe operation in the virtual space. Availability and
disaster recovery solutions should guarantee compliance with SLAs, as well as resilience for critical
city services.

 Managing security services and Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs)
SSC should also consider outsourcing security services to providers who can leverage extensive,
global expertise in the field of cybersecurity to minimize security‐related disruptions and data loss.
The ICT leadership can then be relieved from this particular complex and time‐consuming aspect
and focus on the functional duties of running the city's ICT.

SSC should also rely on their national CERTs to align with national coordination on cyber incidents
and security, and thus benefit from the international visibility this type of coordinated efforts
provide.

 Protecting infrastructure

Securing endpoints, messaging and web environments, defending critical internal servers and
implementing the backup and recovery of data, should be among the key priorities of SSC
strategists. Organizations also need visibility and security intelligence to respond to threats rapidly.

 24x7 availability of the critical infrastructure

Ensuring resilience in case of an incident can be achieved through the adoption of solid backup and
recovery software or appliances, as well as adequate policies, processes and tools.
 Developing an information management strategy

This should include an information retention plan and policies. Organizations need to refrain from
using backup for archiving and legal retention, and should instead implement deduplication
mechanisms to free up resources, adopt a full‐featured archive system, and deploy data loss
prevention technologies.
 Access control at the boundary of network

Access control at the boundary can isolate attacks away from internal networks. Different
boundaries can be implemented, with different policies enforced.
A firewall that consists of access rule, verification tools, packet filtering and application gateway,
can greatly improve the security of an internal network. Since only selected protocols can pass
through the firewall, the network environment has become more secure. Firewall can prevent well‐
known unsafe protocols, making it impossible for external attackers to use these vulnerabilities to
attack the internal network. The firewall should be able to reject all of the above types of attack
packets, and immediately alert the administrator.

ITU‐T's Technical Reports and Specifications 445