Urbanisation is a globally intensifying phenomenon, by the year 2050, 2.5 billion more people will be living in cities, in which around 60 per cent of the infrastructure is yet to be build. Urban regions help better manage larger populations, while offering enhanced living quality, opportunities for growth and resources efficiency (Ramaswami et al., 2016). With the global movement towards urbanisation and the widespread use of internet technologies, the concept of smart cities has drawn a lot of research interest and attention in recent years (Khatoun and Zeadally, 2016; Meijer and Bolívar, 2016; Angelidou, 2015). In particular, new technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, Data Analytics and cloud computing, are examples of supporting services and offerings for the future of urban life. Nonetheless, to ensure seamless operations for these smart cities, protecting information and infrastructure by maintaining robust information security becomes a necessity. Information security is considered to be of critical significance to the implementation and development of smart cities and one of its most serious challenges (Khatoun and Zeadally, 2016). The related governance processes and mechanisms also appear in the literature to be one of the most important pillars for the success of smart cities (Meijer and Bolívar 2016; Belissent, 2011), noting that such imply several challenges at the national and organisational levels. The past few years have seen rapid development of the smart city concept. Numerous countries all around the world have already adopted smart city transformation programmes and are competing to achieve better and faster revolutions of their infrastructure. The IESE Cities in Motion Index (Berrone and Ricart, 2017) has also been developed since 2014 to annually update on cities progress and rank in the different smart city dimensions (human capital, economics, environment, social cohesion, urban planning, public management, etc.), current top-ranking cities include New York, London, Paris, etc. Early studies on the smart city topic started with Komninos (2002) describing the different aspects of an intelligent city, but also discussing its competitive aspects, such as industrial, digital and learning capabilities. When discussing the characteristics of cities improvement, researchers such as Shapiro (2006) and Mulligan and Olsson (2013) discussed the impact on the quality of living and education by the increased urbanisation of metropolitan areas. In 2007, Giffinger et al.’s (2007) report on European smartness ranking expands the “smart city” concept to include evaluation measures and capabilities, to open the competition between European cities. Such measures include economy, people, governance, mobility, environment and living. Giffinger et al. (2007) developed 31 factors and 74 indicators for smart city ranking for 70 cities in the EU. Their main goal is reducing energy use and gas emissions by 2020. Hollands (2008) argues that smart cities should not be considered as large IT projects, whilst emphasising the human capital role in terms of education, creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship in determining the role and future of the city. Meijer and Bolívar (2016) also discussed the weight of smart city governance dimension and the need for strong infrastructure transformation abilities. Smart cities are proving to be an important phenomenon for urban living, promising better living for citizens; however, different challenges exist that need to be dealt with.