Lack of cyber investment could spell trouble for smart cities: report

A lack of investment in cybersecurity protections could imperil the future of smart cities and the Internet of Things devices on which they run, a new report from ABI Research warns.

ABI anticipates there will be 1.3 billion wide-area network smart city connections by the year 2024. Of the $135 billion projected to be invested into critical infrastructure cybersecurity in 2024, ABI expects that the financial, information and communication technologies (ICT) industry and the defense industry will account for 56 percent of that spend. That leaves just 44 percent left over for energy, health care, public security, transport and water and waste – an insufficient share to adequate protect these sectors, the report asserts.

An executive summary of ABI report asserts that cyber investments are rarely discussed during the development process as smart cities grow in complexity, an oversight that will eventually catch up to governments, forcing them to correct past mistakes. Furthermore, the summary notes that developing an effective security framework for smart cities is not easy because “myriad issues will appear in each step of the value chain.”

ABI expects that by 2024, almost 50 percent of WAN smart city connections will run on LPWA-LTE (low power wide area LTE) and LPWA Proprietary technology. In its press release, the research firm acknowledged that certain LPWA protocols, including Narrowband IoT, are “attempting to tackle at least some digital and communication security challenges.” But “the fact of the matter remains that these intrinsically lightweight cellular versions aim toward lowering bandwidth cost, increasing coverage, and lowering latency and are not, in general, capable of handling the increased number of cyber threats in the interconnected smart city environment,” ABI concludes.