The City of St. Gallen, Switzerland, has kicked-off a Smart Lighting project which is expected to save up to 65% of power thanks to the implementation of energy-efficient LED luminaires and an advanced remote control system.

France-IX, the Internet peering service provider in France, announced it is delivering greater connectivity to its peering members and supporting the rapid growth of the Marseille international gateway with the opening of its third point of presence (PoP) in Interxion’s new MRS2 datacentre.

Facilitating parking in city centres is good for the local economy. If the political will is there it’s relatively easy to deploy smart parking systems and many authorities see them as the logical first step of large smart city projects.

InterDigital, Inc., a mobile technology research and development company, announced two new commercial service customers of the oneTRANSPORT™ data marketplace. Local authorities Hertfordshire County Council and Buckinghamshire County Council

Aerohive Networks®, a cloud Networking provider, announced an industry first for unified SD-WAN & SD-LAN access networks, adding end-to-end granular user and application policy enforcement, and new WAN and VPN link-performance analytics for greater insight into the overall operations of distributed networks.

Apstra® Inc. has launched version 2.1 of AOS® with Intent-Based Analytics™ (IBA). AOS IBA embeds automated big data analytics into its real-time continuous validation capability. This provides the control that companies require as they upgrade their network infrastructures to address their digital transformation and IoT goals.

Navigation technologies company, TomTom, announced the introduction of TomTom Traffic in Japan. This extends the service’s reach to 69 countries with a combined population of more than five billion people. TomTom Traffic covers secondary and surface roads, broad coverage, low latency and high GPS probe density.

Service providers are faced with a great opportunity in the era of IoT, but with it comes great risk. It’s been a turbulent time for service providers in recent months, not least due to the rise in frequency and complexity of DDoS attacks which can completely knock out their networks.

It was because of the growing security risks surrounding these devices last year that a number of internet criminals were able to weaponise them and as a result, take a number of websites and services offline by launching DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks.

In the last year, we’ve all heard of the Mirai malware, but did you know that Mirai is Japanese for ‘the future’? And that’s what I believe we are seeing: The future of cyber-attacks.