Networked Enterprise Featured Article

When it comes to critical infrastructure, there are very few who would disagree that things like roads, bridges, dams, utilities and canals aren’t worthy of the term “infrastructure.” But unfortunately, their resilience and capability for disaster recovery aren’t what they should be.

To take a look at the state of our infrastructure, the White House brought leading minds in the field together this month to examine how projects like new roads and transit lines can be designed to foster economic opportunity and increase resilience to the impacts of climate change. That confab dovetailed with the release of the Federal Guide to Infrastructure Planning and Design too, a community resource guide that incorporates programs and opportunities from eight federal agencies.

According to Jeffrey Zients, director of the National Economic Council and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, and Christy Goldfuss, managing director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, a range of public-private partnerships can address the need to up our game on infrastructure.

“In Maryland, Prince George’s County just launched a first-of-its-kind public private partnership to install green storm-water infrastructure, including rain barrels, green roofs and permeable pavement,” they explained in a blog. “The new partnership will support minority business hiring and provide career training and mentoring for workers while installing state of the art systems that improve water quality and build resilience to flooding and other impacts of climate change.”

And in a more well-known example, during the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the federal government partnered with Northeastern states, cities and towns to rebuild roads, schools, electric utilities and add or restore other critical assets, like flood protections in the New York subway system.

But hand-in-hand with response is the need for appropriate disaster recovery plans, particularly for aging infrastructure. During Hurricane Sandy, disaster recovery for data centers and utilities played a critical role in minimizing both the human impact and economic damage from the event.

Panduit addresses the issue with what it calls the Unified Physical Infrastructure. The UPI approach takes typically disparate and segregated systems — communication, computing, control, power and security — and aligns them into a single, agile unified physical infrastructure that minimizes risk, increases flexibility and delivers maximum performance, allowing for resiliency across the footprint.

According to government data, there’s no time to lose in making the necessary upgrades: The United States population will grow by 70 million people by 2045, and the demands on our infrastructure systems will grow in parallel. And there are other stressors: The National Association of Clean Water Agencies estimates that adaptation to climate change will cost water utilities between $500 billion and a $1 trillion over the next 35 years.