Pittsburgh heads for the cloud to speed up smart city drive

Source:-https://cities-today.com/

The City of Pittsburgh has entered into a four-year agreement to migrate its legacy IT infrastructure to Google Cloud.

The initiative aims to help the city reduce costs, move off its “brittle” older IT systems and create a platform for smart city projects and digital services.

Heidi Norman, Director of the Department of Innovation and Performance, City of Pittsburgh, told Cities Today: “City departments will have access to work with easy-to-use query tools to analyse data in our cloud-based data lake – which in Pittsburgh we call our Data Rivers – to build needed dashboards and reporting for improved data-driven decision-making and management of city services.”

The move to the cloud could support projects related to mobility, transportation, infrastructure, public safety and more.

Norman said: “Our department supports the innovative services other departments require to assist our residents, so we’ll be able to work with other city departments to develop solutions where they are seeing opportunities for tech-enabled services. In moving to Google Cloud, the City of Pittsburgh is building the foundation to speed up the delivery of new technologies.”

Pilot for city benefits
The migration will begin with IT tools for monitoring and managing the city’s infrastructure. After this, compute and storage capacity will be moved into the cloud, followed by the remaining applications.

Google has helped Pittsburgh create a roadmap for moving its infrastructure quickly and Cloud Bakers, a Google Cloud partner, will assist the city with the migration.

“Google and the City of Pittsburgh have collaborated to design an innovative solution that few other cities so far have had the opportunity to accomplish,” Norman said: “Not only is this partnership with Google Cloud an investment in improving the efficiency and reliability of the city’s IT infrastructure; it also serves as a pilot partnership for Google Cloud’s added value for municipalities that includes training and certifications for our city IT staff so that we can develop our internal talent to manage these services in the future.”