The cloud: reaching high

So, what’s the solution to sharing the gains from innovation while keeping strategic goals on course (as if there was ever only one) and avoiding being buried under a mountain of data?

The experience of cities well advanced in open and agile practices provides a significant clue to how we can share the spoils, which, for now, delivers many benefits and continues to hold much promise: the cloud.

Cloud-operated urban and local data platforms have provided freedom and flexibility for many cities to achieve sophisticated analysis and insights on internal operations, as well as wider urban priorities, without having to invest in siloed infrastructure back at base. Cloud functionality has facilitated smaller cities and towns to access infrastructure for which they would be otherwise priced out, and has created opportunities for substantial savings within municipal operations that can be redirected to other pressing demands. Data lakes, machine learning, analytics, IoT and other tools to help unlock data - turning it from information into insight - are now available at the click of a button at comparatively affordable prices.

While cloud operations are by no means the only answer and - as OASC can attest, many cities are working positively within vendor-specific onsite environments - the cloud provides an opportunity for urban managers to explore addressing priorities in an agile way. Cloud-based solutions are being developed across the world, and many are replicable and interoperable. Access to cloud-based services can be utilised only when needed, so there is no long-term vendor lock-in for either storage or tools. This means we can, as urban managers, pick and choose between solutions with minimal disruption - trying them on for size, and adopting, or moving on to a new innovation where it seems a better fit.