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INDUSTRY WATCH
A PRIVATE CLOUD NOT
ONLY SECURELY PROVIDES
OPERATORS THE NEEDED
INTERCONNECTIVITY,
BUT ALSO AN AGILE
AND FLEXIBLE
COMPUTING CAPABILITY.
operators and gain the ability to provide
commuters and customers with improved
or even new products or services –
making a private cloud-based data centre
the ideal option.
Harvesting synergies: As rail operators
switch to broadband, they find that they
still have spare bandwidth on top of that
required for critical communications;
they can now use this to start collecting
and analysing different sources of data
from trains or trackside installations,
including a myriad of data from sensors
feeding on Internet of Things.
Rail operators across the world set up
projects to make use of this information
to determine if there are problems
aboard coaches, or elsewhere in the
infrastructure, that requires attention,
whether this is faulty air conditioning
or variation of vi brations that hint at
maintenance is required.
Customer projects show that predictive
maintenance in combination of IoT with
private, hybrid or public cloud and the
use of own or third party predictive tools
give huge advantages over a time-based
preventative maintenance approach.
Combining broadband connectivity
with cloud further enables intelligent
video surveillance across the fleet and
operations, allowing the business to keep
track of assets and work being carried out
or support new approaches such as video-
based fare collection.
Future services could even include the
provision of seatback information
and entertainment, like what is found
with airlines.
Norman Frisch, Business Development
Transport Solutions at Huawei Enterprise
A cloud-based approach to rail
With this ambition of revitalising the
railways, and increasing rail’s market share
in intermodal systems, South African rail
operators will need to invest in a solution
that can provide them with a high-
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INTELLIGENTCIO
performance service platform, converged
network and data centre that provides the
reliability and redundancy needed.
They need to break down information silos
to enable information sharing between
trains, stations and even line and service
A private cloud not only securely provides
operators the needed interconnectivity,
but also an agile and flexible computing
capability to support continuous service
integration, and high concurrent
processing, such as making online ticket
bookings. With cloud, operators can
get the flexibility they need to securely
expand their operations to meet future
growth requirements. n
www.intelligentcio.com