Page 457 - Shaping smarter and more sustainable cities - Striving for sustainable development goals

10 Conclusions

Smart sustainable cities are emerging around the globe, with numerous examples of initiatives
fostered by local, national and transnational governments and various institutions.

Consequently, local administrators and policy makers will be increasingly driven to make their cities
more competitive in order to attract businesses, talent and taxpayers, as well as to comply with
sustainable policies, including greenhouse gas emission targets and carbon footprint guidelines.

SSC deployments will involve multifaceted developments carried out by a diverse ecosystem of
providers in innovative domains, as well as the adoption of state‐of‐the‐art technologies
characterized by critical and complex ICT implementations.
However, the rise in ICT complexity has also translated into increasing levels of vulnerability, both
to malicious attacks and to unintentional incidents.
The analysis conducted in this Technical Report has explored how leadership and governance are
key drivers, as well as essential conditions to ensure cyber resilience and service resilience within
smart sustainable cities.

Protecting both the systems and the data with rigorous policies, up‐to‐date technology and
techniques, will prove vital in ensuring the continuity and the resilience of all the services involved
in the SSC architecture.

Only by conceiving interconnected urban systems with security and information protection in mind,
SSC administrators will be able to ensure the safety and the well‐being for citizens and businesses
alike.
Security threats and defensive strategies are now an integral part of the discussion in the policy
making boardrooms, as much as they are in the private sector. Public administrators know that any
serious incident or breach could result in devastating outcomes in terms of financial, data, credibility
and reputation loss. Thus, city planners and administrators should take proactive steps to ensure
systems' security and data protection from the early stages of the SSC's inception and planning
process. This constitutes a crucial step towards building resilient, smart sustainable cities for the
twenty‐first century.

ITU‐T's Technical Reports and Specifications 447