Using real-time data to solve real-world problems

MOST public sector decision makers have been working with lagging data in the past. It often took government agencies years to plan, conduct and analyse a population census, for example, with census takers going door to door to talk to households; but this was the only way to obtain comprehensive data at that time.

As a result, city leaders had to make plans on the assumption that circumstances could have changed substantially by the time that planning initiatives were finally introduced.

Today's cloud-connected world has the potential to help cities in Asia introduce new ways of making residents' lives easier through the gathering of much richer data in real time. Instead of tendering for information technology (IT) infrastructure months or even years ahead of time, then purchasing and managing it, governments can simply request and pay for the cloud computing resources that they need when they need it, and leave the time-consuming business of maintenance to the cloud provider.