You've travelled around Africa for some time now and met government officials. What tops the mind of public safety owners? What can you tell us about their vision and their challenges?

For the last year, I've met most of public safety owners in the region and my observation is that public safety and potential exposure related to it tops the agenda in Africa. The issue is that while most look at "emergency services response" as the best answer for public safety, the current emergency response centres have shockingly serious limitations.

With mobile devices being the main mode of communications, you may want to ask if the legacy PSAP systems (public safety answering points) can locate users in the event of an emergency. The traditional model was not built with mobile devices in mind, and hence it was easier to tie a location to a hard phone in your home or office. Today, however, a number is associated with a person and not with a location, or even a device. But where is that person located and how can he or she be helped in crisis?

I have been pleasantly surprised with some areas in the region where some applications have been developed to provide instant location services as the person in crisis dials for emergency. Without getting into details, this means some systems have already established both a voice and data channel, allowing location to be immediately sent to a central command, as the individual dials for emergency. This is very positive to see, but, as you can imagine, it is not broadly implemented in all countries. Some are clearly lagging behind.

In addition, the next step is to take full advantage of the multimedia capabilities and also enable a discrete video channel when dialling for emergencies. One benefit of the data channel through simple functionality is SMS; this means a video can be pushed to the person in crisis. Imagine someone having a heart attack in a restaurant right next to you, but you are not CPR trained, what do you do? What if the emergency services operator could instantly forward you a video showing how to perform CPR? This can save a life. What if someone was trying to rob a bank? What if your mobile device could be instantly converted into a video surveillance input for the emergency response team to have a live video feed of the situation as they are en route to the location where this situation is happening? See latest case study on video-surveillance multicasting.

This is what I call Smart-Safety, and the use cases are unlimited. Smart-Safety is now live in many parts across the world and the region, but there is a wide opportunity to progress and make it consistent across countries.

What's the latest in cyber security from a networking perspective?

With everything going on right now in the world, I think a lot of people would guess cyber security is top of mind for governments lately, and in the foreseeable future. In fact, I am sure many are starting to reconsider corporate support for BYOD, and certainly SDN, where open code architecture is being promoted and expected to help drive business agility. From a more fundamental security point of view, governments and enterprises are very concerned about anyone penetrating their corporate networks and assets, which exposes their intellectual property, and of course, potential citizens and customer information. Therefore, seeking solutions that reduce the ability for hackers to gain access and visibility of their IP infrastructure and topology, tops the minds of decision-makers in the private and public sector. There are solutions out there which can assist; however, they require a shift in mindset and a transition from the legacy architecture. Customers need to urgently open their minds and quickly evaluate what's on offer. The key to a viable solution is to embrace an ecosystem of technology to address these needs.

Not one vendor can do this on its own, which reinforces the need for an open architecture away from proprietary schemes. The good news is that there are solutions out there; the bad news is that if private and public enterprises are looking at the same vendors that built their networks 20 years ago proclaiming they can do it all, this approach will fail.

My recommendation is for them to open their minds to an open architecture, and yet controlled with accountability from specific technology experts, which will provide pieces to the puzzle. We have recently launched the Avaya SDN FX (Software Defined Networking – Fabric Extended) networking solution, which, based on an Ethernet topology and single IP protocol, turns your network literally completely visible to security threats. See more on Avaya SDN FX here.

Do smart cities create security challenges? What are they?

In fact, I think it is the opposite if they are truly implementing a "smart city" solution. Smart city is more than just enabling WiFi services. My observation is that there is a new trend taking shape: while WiFi is certainly one of the services, part of most smart city initiatives that I am seeing are adding video surveillance and analytics in very large scale, which is quite difficult once again when using a legacy infrastructure.

As governments provision all these new capabilities and services to their smart cities, they will have to review their infrastructure to be able to scale and meet the real-time analytics requirements. They would also have to consider adding sensor technology to address various needs contributing to making the city safer. As an example, if the city uses natural gas, they may want to implement sensors to detect the flow and potential leaks of gas throughout the city to quickly react to a potential issue. For instance, governments can leverage video surveillance analytics to be able to intelligently track an emergency response vehicle, and control the robots and reduce the time to destination and collision potential. In many cities around the world, street lights are a source of wasted energy, which can be remotely controlled throughout the night, depending on cars and people – traffic intensity; by leveraging real-time analytics, this can be easily achieved and therefore reduces electricity consumption without compromising residents' or visitors' security. There are many examples like this, but I would summarise in saying smart cities will improve security as opposed to augment or create security risks if properly implemented.

How are vendors like you linking IOT with security? What are the challenges?

To address and enhance security as part of a smart city initiative, many devices such as cameras, sensors, wearables, etc, need to be deployed and implemented. All these require connectivity at the edge of the networking infrastructure. Of course, carrier wireless will play a key role into this, but many will require connectivity to the city infrastructure and even the carrier connected devices will likely have to connect securely back to some common analytics infrastructure securely.

All these are what we refer to as edge devices, which is what the Internet of things (IOT) or Internet of everything (IOE) is all about. The challenge is how to securely connect all these devices at the edge of my city network, and connect securely the ones through a carrier or third party infrastructure? This means we need much more agility to add 10 000s of devices to a network that, in the past, would require multiple physical networks to scale and not compromise security. IOT and security as well as scalability and reliability, all need to be seriously evaluated. What is the point of deploying IOT if it cannot scale, is not secure and not reliable? That wouldn't be too smart, would it?

In the end, it converges to the need for next-generation architecture to address the next-generation smart cities' needs. You can't achieve these business objectives with a 20- or 25-year-old client-server architecture.

The good news is there is a next-generation architecture being proposed, but unfortunately many vendors are trying to fool the market by renaming and shifting complexity from one place to the other, and hoping customers will not notice. A due diligence is definitely required to achieve these objectives. The good news is that there is a solution to this: a next-generation matrix architecture based on Ethernet transport and optimised for IP services, regardless of their connectivity methodology. Avaya introduced SDN Fx for that exact reason, to scale, enhance security, deliver best-in-class reliability and provide the best foundation to smart cities and IOT/IOE. Already demonstrated near 15 000 cameras running over a single converged infrastructure with one protocol, 500ms or better recovery times. This is the kind of infrastructure shift smart cities require to save lives, enhance resident experience, and enable new services the community will benefit from.

Nations have different visions of what smart cities are. What is a smart city from your perspective?

Smart cities are about enabling new services to better service your population. This is about making your city safer, offering new services while enabling consumers to use the services, to drive net new revenues or, in some cases, focused only on providing a better experience to visitors and tourists.

If residents feel safe, get best-in-class services and feel their city is at the forefront of offering new services, they will be happier and they will share their feelings with others and especially on social media.

From a technical perspective, how can governments make their cities safer?

Cities have to move to a different architecture model to support next-generation smart-x services. The legacy client-server model has served us well, but over 25 years we have increased its complexity and made reliability a huge challenge due to complex protocols required to address all of these business needs.

From security, to scalability, to video streaming to recovery times from failures, the legacy model is no longer suitable and it is time to press the 'reset' button and start with a new mindset.

Technically and simply, it is all about Ethernet and IP. That's it. So, how do we best support wireless or wired services over Ethernet to better support IP-based applications and services? It is not by renaming old stuff something different that we will achieve these objectives.

The market has to stop tolerating vendors trying to fool them and challenge all of them to offer something innovative and suitable to meet the smart cities, IOT/IOE requirements. Someone famous once said, doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is called… insanity… let's not go down this path, please. The technology is available now, but some vendors are lagging being because they have been so fixated on the data centre. Consider this: how many of residents or end-users sit in the data centre? How many video cameras for traffic control or sensors to detect gas leaks are deployed in data centres? Some vendors are clearly missing the mark. Avaya saw this opportunity and has differentiated its offering by optimising its next-generation architecture to be perfectly tailored to enable IP services over Ethernet. Avaya SDN Fx is the smart choice for smart cities and IOT, there is no doubt in my mind.