Data Protection at the Edge Resolution
Adopted at the 87th Annual Meeting in 2019
WHEREAS, data is growing in exponential rates and as the Internet of Things (IOT), connected devices, autonomous vehicles, robotics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, graphic computing, smart grids, supercomputing, quantum computing, and other technologies become more prevalent and dominant in the economy; and
WHEREAS, the reality is data systems are more vulnerable than ever before from risks of physical intrusion and infiltration of edge sensors, data centers and associated networks, faulty equipment from legacy systems, natural disasters, and diminished energy reliability than ever before; and
WHEREAS, the cost of downtime or system failure is getting more expensive and data centers are becoming more valuable to business operations and increase the value of business operations. 59 percent of Fortune 500 companies experience a minimum of 1.6 hours per week of system downtime equating to $46 million dollars per year; and
WHEREAS, the hourly costs of downtime by industry is estimated at; Energy $ 2.6 million, Manufacturing $ 1.6 million, Telecom $ 2.0 million, Retail $ 1.1 million, Healthcare $ 636,000 million; and
WHEREAS, latency is expensive. Amazon found that every 100ms of latency cost them 1 percent in sales, meaning that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year. Google has calculated that slowing its search results by just four tenths of a second could mean a loss of 8 million searches per day according to Data Center Frontier, and
WHEREAS, as our communities move toward becoming Smart Cities, we experience an increased demand on our infrastructure and Price Waterhouse Coopers estimates 40 percentage of mileage driven to be autonomous by 2030; and
WHEREAS, the Federal Aviation Administration is anticipating 2.2 million Unmanned Aircraft to be in operation in the U.S. by 2023; and
WHEREAS, advances in Un-manned Autonomous Vehicles (UAV) will require significant investment in infrastructure deployments such as mapping, edge sensors integration, UAV HD video, Lidar, and other technologic edge sensors; all of which will place a greater burden on data collection, demand faster processing, and require analytics close to the source while necessitating more demand for data continuity; and
WHEREAS, in order to maintain on-going operations, reliability of data networks is essential for ensuring public safety and service delivery. Public and private entities should look for solutions to provide for the continuity of data systems from any and all threats with persistent, secure and resilient architecture; and
WHEREAS, physical threats, natural disasters and energy reliability impacts can be mitigated and protect the stored and redundant data by requiring uninterruptible power supplies, redundant backup power solutions, water-free cooling systems, advanced facility construction with nonflammable materials and 200 MPH wind resistant-roof for network and data centers with; and
WHEREAS, fault-tolerant solutions at the edge and edge aggregation points provide for less cyber risk by enabling a system to continue its intended operation without failing completely, resilient and redundant networks that continue to transmit data despite the failure of some links or nodes, and preserve connectivity with the least latency for data processing and storage close to the edge sensor source,
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that The United States Conference of Mayors urges the Administration and the U.S. Congress to encourage fault-tolerant technology solutions critically necessary for resilience, redundancy, and reliability of data systems; protecting public and private data with the highest possible standards to ensure data centers and edge computing facilities function for continuity of services and network operations; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that federal government contracting of data storage with any private data center should only contract with entities that use fault-tolerant solutions and follow the standards set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and Federal Acts, FITARA and FDCCI adopted in 2014 that ensure physical protection, redundancy, sustainability, and resiliency of the power supply.