“Smart City” is a term used to describe an urban area that utilise technology to both improve existing services, and to solve new and emerging issues that Urban Living and Urban Growth present. The world is an increasingly urbanised place. The United Nations state that in 2018 55% of the world’s population lived in urbanised areas, with growth projected to see this increase to around 68% by 2050. Managing this growth and the required extension of services and resources to accommodate it is a huge challenge for local and national governments across the world.

One area in which cities are looking at is mobility. Connected, transparent and digital urban transport processes to benefit citizens mobility and environment. Technology is reshaping cities and changing the way we travel, with citizens wanting more environmentally friendly options, real-time information and effective public transport. As new technology is increasingly introduced into cities some trends can be seen:

1. Vehicle automation: the potential to create new opportunities within the public and private sector. Moving people around city centres effectively is becoming a growing challenge and cars can create an ever-moving network to make real-time adjustments, ease congestion and report on road conditions. A city will need a physical infrastructure to handle autonomous vehicles that includes an IT infrastructure to manage data storage, performance, security and resilience. 

2. Electric powered vehicles: Smart Cities are at the forefront to switch to electric transport and with increased urbanisation a focus is on carbon-neutralising cities. Electric vehicles are part of the solution towards cleaner transport, better air quality and climate change.

3. Shared mobility: Mobility as a Service is growing within cities with more accessible transport, on demand options, so citizens can use their preferred mode of transport on a short-term basis. The most well known car-share services is the likes of Uber making it quicker and easier. Another common service is bike-sharing with easy access to bike stations around cities with online payment plans.

4. Digital information: as technology is integrated into different areas of city transport data can be collected and shared to help bridge information gaps making public services more efficient, enhance decision making and deliver real-time schedules and information to users.

By introducing more technology to transport with real-time information and mobile applications the customer experience is enhanced and citizens can make more efficient and informed mobility choices.

A BAI Communications Connectivity Outlook Report 2020 found that:

“95% of rail users would be more likely to use the rail network in their city if technology-driven solutions were implemented.”

Now is the time for governments and companies to collaborate and innovate, leading the way, defining good practice to enable data sharing and technology development to encourage increased adoption for Smart City industries. 

“A cornerstone of the smart city is the dismantlement of so-called ‘silos’, or the “isolation of individuals and departments in different units, people and groups who share little and who indeed hoard information valuable to others” (iglus.org)

Connectix is a Smart Cities Collaborative Network for Northern Ireland. Connectix brings together seven of Northern Ireland’s leading technology companies to scope and study the opportunities for collaboration in addressing the ever-growing and global “Smart City” marketplace. Find Out More:

Anaeko is delighted to announce our membership of leading trade association British Water to support our growth and development as a specialist data & analytics solutions provider in the water sector.

British Water has a varied membership of companies covering all sectors of the water and wastewater industry. Their members design, build, operate, maintain and provide critical solutions, technologies and research for water and wastewater assets at home and internationally.  The association works to bring a leading and coherent voice on behalf of the supply chain and ensure that members have access to the information and contacts they need to enhance their business.

As well as actively promoting best practice, British Water liaises with government, regulators and represents the interests of the UK water and wastewater industry on UK and European regulations and legislation, terms and conditions of contract and procurement practice, and in the creation of European and International Standards.

Anaeko’s focus on the water sector builds upon our strategic relationship with Northern Ireland Water where, in collaboration with water industry specialists, we are utilising data and analytics to deliver operational improvements in areas such as water pumping efficiencies, leakage analysis and asset & telemetry alignment.

As a member of British Water, Anaeko will increase our profile, enhance business growth opportunities and contribute towards best practice in the water and wastewater industry. We will apply our innovation techniques, depth of technical expertise and cross sectoral experience to actively collaborate alongside other members to address the environmental, regulatory and societal challenges of the sector.

Hybrid Cloud Integration Partner

Anaeko addresses the problem of increasing cloud complexity by providing large enterprises, system integrators and service providers with a Trusted Data Partner.

The Opportunities of Hybrid Cloud Integration

Since 2004, Anaeko has delivered hybrid cloud integration services. We helped companies get advantage of the opportunities a Hybrid Cloud Integration brings like:

• Reduce cost
• Manage complexity
• Accelerate growth

The Challenges of Hybrid Cloud Integration

Some of the biggest challenges enterprises face during the Hybrid Cloud Integration process are:

• Cloud Connectivity
• Cloud Security
• Data Governance
• Privacy Requirements

A smart city is “An urban area using different types of data and sensors to provide information, with the goal of efficiently managing assets and resources.” (DisruptorDaily)

With the help from IoT and communities smart cities can improve their urban environments by streamlining public services, help energy distribution, decrease traffic congestion, and improve Air Quality.

55% of the population live in urban environments and these environments play an essential role in human health and wellbeing. Air pollution is an important factor contributing to human health and there is an increasing focus on solving this problem within many cities across the world.

Smart cities are taking advantage of IoT and developing sensors to record real-time air quality data. Moving away from traditional silo-ed data and turning smart cities into data hubs where collaboration and innovation can combine data to improve quality of life and improve city operations. Real-time air quality data alongside other environmental, health, or travel data can provide citizens with the information they need to make informed decisions. 

For example a project completed in 2018 in Leeds called ACCRA (Autonomous and Connected vehicles for CleaneR Air) aimed to develop a system where combined air quality, weather and geofencing would allow remote control of an electric vehicles energy management system and ensure it is running at zero emissions when travelling through poor air quality areas. Find out more.

At Anaeko a use case had been identified were we could provide informative dashboards in order to determine and understand the relationship between air quality and health conditions. A health data research platform was built by combining 11 sources of data across health, geospatial and pollution. 

A data hub with a set of user defined dashboards on top allows each dashboard to be user specific. A view of real-time aggregated data and critical insights for that user. Giving access to various areas of a platform and data that can be analysed, compared and drive decision making. Find out more.

For smart cities to be successful and inform citizens there are some elements that need to be in place like:

• Big Data Integration – a smart city will revolve around the ability to combine data from multiple sources allowing for better decisions and cities to be built in the most energy and health efficient ways.
• Seamless Wireless Connectivity – the base for any smart city technology is reliable wireless connectivity.
• Open Data – all participants in the complex smart city ecosystem must look towards sharing and combining data to achieve better outcomes and analysis in real-time.
• Trusted Security – smart cities depend on reliable and accurate data that is stored, and analysed so these data hubs must take every step possible to ensure data is stored correctly and trust is key. 

Urban environments continue to expand and grow with technology developing alongside to improve citizens wellbeing, health and create a sustainable environment. Cities will need to collaborate with each other to drive innovation with multiple sectors combing data and resources to build real-time contextual data that benefits citizens.

With smart city data growing, every organisation must optimise their data in order to meet customer expectations, reduce risk and maintain competitiveness. Anaeko is your trusted data partner with a portfolio of data optimisation services that support your data maturity journey.

When we talk about hybrid cloud we’re talking about firstly organisations that are using both on-premise private cloud and public cloud offerings and secondly have applications that move between them.

There are various forms of those, for example we have worked on projects where a single application running in an environment is accessing data on private and public cloud because there are different benefits. We have also worked with applications that can move from on-premise into a cloud environment.

In multi-cloud what we’re talking about is using one or more cloud offerings. One survey looked across large enterprises. 94% of them are using hybrid cloud and that’s because they had a traditional legacy of on-premise applications but they are also adopting new cloud analytics and innovative applications, slowly transforming the organisation through digital transformation. 67% of those organisations were multi-cloud through circumstance where they have for example built up, through acquisition, two different sets of technology stacks maybe AWS and Azure.

We are starting to see an acceleration in hybrid and multi-cloud adoption so while large enterprises had adopted that journey, and were on a strategy, some organisations were caught off guard, it wasn’t that they hadn’t thought about it, they just realised with a private managed data centre all of a sudden they had to support a broad range of remote workers. This has now triggered a greater appreciation for what we call best fit cloud strategies.

Best fit is choosing the workload to work in the right place and storing data in the right place. Managing your network, policy and government governance accordingly. Hybrid cloud is sometimes a tactical step as a way to get towards a multi-cloud strategy because hybrid cloud bridges the on-premise enterprise environment and new innovative workloads. For example machine learning, AI and multi-cloud gives this great opportunity to accelerate and innovate.

Different public cloud providers are releasing new services and you can take the best from each of the different clouds. This encourages competition, drives price competitiveness and increases service delivery. We’ve seen this across our clients with an increased demand for cloud assessments, cloud readiness, what workloads can work where, and interoperability services.

So how can you move applications that work from one side to work with another? Our clients have come from a broad range of domains from the telecoms background to public sector central government, health’s private sector, and a range of innovators who are using advanced capabilities of cloud scalability to deliver new disruptive services. They all agree on the same benefits and challenges:

• – Increased agility
• – Cherry-pick the best technologies
• – Optimise cost
• – More than one cloud and more than one technology stack means spreading investment in training and hiring 

Within multi-cloud environments a framework we often use is the design, build and operate model. Doing discoveries to understand the problem, in an agile way, and getting a new product or service to market quickly. Combining all the parts that make up these complex services from the sensor devices to network infrastructure, whether that’s on premise or other service platforms. Those applications are incrementally released and managed for internal line of business and customer facing services. 

DevOps really is about bringing design, development and operations together through tools and processes where there’s an increased cycle of design, build, test, release and monitor. The DevOps market is growing rapidly, that culture is growing rapidly, and within in it we have Kubernetes. 

Looking at service applications what emerged was an optimisation of how applications were built, from services, to very lightweight containers or containerised services. Containers combine an operating system with much lighter service components. Kubernetes is a platform to manage those so you can deploy quickly and orchestrate an increasing number of applications. It’s not necessarily relevant to every single application but Kubernetes has become the de-facto platform for cloud native applications and some of the benefits are faster time-to-market, the ability to scale quicker, and elastic scaling, increasing and decreasing the capacity, improving your availability, optimise the underlying IT cost through digital transformation and support a migration to cloud and enable multi-cloud flexibility.

Kubernetes is a capability that can help organisations address the hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud reality.

Hybrid-cloud Scalability

80% of organisation data is unstructured and those organisations are struggling with that explosion of data growth so they want to accelerate their analytics, automate machine learning pipelines, apply data governance, facilitate audits and regulatory compliance, and ultimately optimise cost because so much of that data may be redundant obsolete or trivial, or it could be accessed infrequently and moved to colder cheaper storage.

We collaborate with 5 agile teams distributed across 9 global sites, applying scaled agile framework (SAFe) principles to the project. Development, devops and test resources deliver fortnightly releases, from a shared code base, against a product roadmap. We combine industry best-practice and Anaeko’s Practical Agile methodology to ensure predictable, stable, releases. To date, we have successfully delivered 40 sprints and enabled 6 major releases of a global product.

One example project is a hybrid-cloud product that scans on-premise and cloud storage environments at massive scale, with an agile distributed team, that needs to cope and deliver on an advertised schedule. Kubernetes fits in where the application itself has been designed from the start as a micro-service so our architecture consists of a number of components that are deployed as docker containers and Kubernetes is used to manage the containers within the system from development to test.

Kubernetes allows developers to focus more on the the functionality of the product without the need to worry so much about deployment, so although we were on a fixed release cycle it allows us to develop more features within each release maintaining scalability and availability. The product was developed with Kubernetes in mind but the initial version of the deployment was deployed effectively as a virtual machine which meant that only vertical scaling was possible. Deployment into Kubernetes meant we had the option to scale horizontally. 

Anaeko Kubernetes Interoperability Service makes things work at scale, optimising Kubernetes and digital transformation from on-premise to hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud for companies and organisations implementing cloud best-fit. We’ve developed tools and techniques with mixed skills teams. Contact us for more information around our Kubernetes and digital transformation services: here