Smart city strategy's harmonization impact on cybersecurity

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Ali Al Janadebah

E-Services Manager Al Baha Municipality, KSA

: J Comput Eng Inf Technol

Abstract

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Smart cities considered as one of the most important developments of the era because of the sustainable urban life and its quality improvements through the digital transformation of its infrastructure using advanced abroach like information and communications technologies (ICT), operational technology (OT), internet of things (IoT) artificial intelligence (AI), networks and applications that collect and analyze data, cloud computing and 5G.
Riyadh has maintained its position as the third smart Arab city according to the IMD Smart City Index 2023. Also, the index included Makkah, Jeddah and Madinah among 141 cities in the world. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia ranked second country globally in the cybersecurity index within the World Competitiveness Yearbook for 2022 published by the Switzerland-based International Institute for Management Development (IMD). But it ranked sixty-one in Privacy protection by law content index within the same Yearbook. In fact, smart cities are attractive targets for cyber threats actors because of: Data sensitivity and IoT and OT artificial intelligence integration vulnerabilities.
Smart cities systems and their various components distributed among stakeholders such as municipality, the police, traffic, civil defense, industry/business and other entities, and the data collected from them will exchanged through the infrastructure that all stakeholders participate in establishing it according to their roles. Whereas each of them can plan and implement some projects related to others separately, which leads to work duplication, increased spending and waste of resources. After reviewing smart cities relationships between stakeholders in the global best practices and KSA's smart government strategy. I suggest establishing senior leadership authority to follow the roles and responsibilities of each stakeholder to improve alignments between them and apply the governance policies to increase the effectiveness of cybersecurity and apply spending efficiency.
Recent Publications :
1. Al Janadebh, Ali (2014) Improving the electronic transaction system in Al Baha Municipality
2. Al Janadebh, Ali (2019) Social media Investment more effectively in serving the national archives.
3. Al Janadebh, Ali (2023) Preserving national communities in the cyber world
4. Al Janadebh, Ali (2023) Smart city strategy's harmonization impact on cybersecurity.

Biography

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More than 22 years of experience in IT and leadership in both business and government sectors. Now, acting as www.balady.gov.sa. E-Services manager and Deputy IT manager at Al Baha municipality