Page 66 - RC21 EDGE Summer Issue

facilities teams. IT’s priority is to protect the systems. They would rather a system be shut down or rendered inaccessible and be safe. Building operations’ priority is to keep systems operational, even it means some exposure or risk.
“External hacking is what most people think of regarding cybersecurity, but statistically speaking that’s not the main threat,” he said. He described some of the costliest building system events experienced by their customers.
“In one case, ransomware downloaded from phishing attacks took down building automation systems, requiring a total rebuild. In two other cases, all building systems were knocked completely offline in a high rise due to an IT scan and dozens of buildings were shut down simultaneously due to poor global user admin management. Finally, one system was used to print
out a threat on its local printer. All of these resulted in substantial financial and business impacts,” Shircliff said. “What is interesting is that only one of those incidents was from an outside source, or so-called hacking. Cybersecurity and operational interruption problems have proven to be more internal, than external.”
He recommends three steps to make sure your organization is ready for smart building systems integration:
– Inventory systems, connections and contractors
– Assess risk areas from inventory
– Solve for both the internal and external risks
By taking this approach, cybersecurity risks relating to smart building systems can be minimized.
Future
Common Protocol
Smart building integrators have long been able to translate open protocols such as BACNET to normalize the points to a common format; the translations, however, were never perfect. More platforms require more work to create the database and ensure correct
translation. As building owners look to connect more platforms, the need for a common protocol increases. Some predict BACNET, LON, Modbus, etc., will soon become obsolete. “Everything will be IP-enabled
with either wireless access points or CAT 6 ethernet connection,” Martin predicted. Perdue believes that eventually building owners will have, “one provider responsible for placing their building’s data into the cloud, while some ancillary IOT devices will upload to a manufacturer’s cloud,” he said. “Integration will happen in the cloud-to-cloud layer via APIs.”
Companywide Integration with Enterprise Software
As I mentioned above, integration is now possible with many company enterprise systems.
“Data from financial, real estate and other business systems can provide a wholistic organizational view from a real estate perspective,” said Kyle Tooke, ThoughtWire’s Global Director of Sales, Smart Buildings. “Asset managers can know with great accuracy the expected lifespan of building equipment, finance teams can receive highly accurate cost forecasts for utilities; leasing managers can provide a wealth of accurate data to potential tenants, and so on.”
The sky is now the limit as integration goes beyond control platforms and advanced, real-time and future modeling of building performance becomes available on a scale never before possible. This is going to make for an exciting future for building owners and operators.
John M. Hester is the owner and chief consultant at Hester Consulting, which specializes in helping facilities managers and other consulting firms in Energy Management, Building Operations, Smart Building Application and Program Management. He
recently retired as Executive Director of Global Building Engineering Services for Warner Media’s Global Real Estate team. In his role, he provided strategic and technical direction for building engineering services across the Warner Media (formerly Time Warner) portfolio and leads Centers of Excellence (COEs) for best practices.
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