Do You Know Your Building Network?

Most think they do, but they don't.

Surveys performed by Intelligent Buildings in thousands of buildings in the U.S and Canada have been eye-opening, to say the least, to almost all building owners. Their perception versus the reality of the findings varied from somewhat surprised to utter disbelief.

The four reference architectures shown below are typically what was found in CRE buildings. Which one is yours?

In 80% of the buildings assessed the various systems were isolated from each other. However, most were connected to the web and accessible remotely by either public IP or vendor-controlled solutions such as TeamViewer, LogMeIn, or cell modem. IT did not have oversight or knowledge of the systems.

11% of the buildings did have IT oversight/control. But even in this case, there were outliers that had a vendor-controlled remote solution such as TeamViewer and LogMeIn. There was also an application host that had two NICs. One NIC was connected to the corporate network and the other directly exposed with a public IP. IT was unaware of any of these.

In this day and age it is rare to find building control systems that have not internet connectivity, but in 8% of the buildings assessed all systems were not connected to the internet or each other.

Owners who thought their systems were not connected in any way were shocked to find that the vendor unbeknownst to them had installed a cell modem so they, the vendor, could work remotely on the system. This occurred in 7% of the buildings assessed. The cell modem was either configured with public access or TeamViewer or LogMeIn. This is similar to the way the Florida water treatment facility was set up.

It's great to get an accurate inventory. This is a great start. However, without assessing the network and how it is configured, most owners will never truly know how their building control systems are set up.

It is highly likely that you fall into the 80% group. Obviously, this is not where you want to stay.