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Cloud-Ready Office Space A Key Criterion?

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What criteria do companies use in choosing office locations?

Many are obvious, as they have been important since high-rises first began to dot the U.S. landscape: centralized location, convenient highway or public transit access, adequate office space, ample parking, and amenities like in-building or nearby food vendors.

Increasingly, though, facility managers and the executive teams they work with are assessing a latter-day criterion that is becoming as important as any: Is the building “cloud-ready”? Companies are ever more reliant on high-speed network connectivity to the Internet and other essential services, including access to public or private clouds—which are a popular alternative to on-site servers by providing secure storage of, and access to, data and software programs.

Buildings that are not “cloud-ready” are (in the minds of many decision makers) about as useful as offices without electricity or bathrooms. Consider these statistics: Global IT traffic has increased more than fourfold in the past five years, and will increase threefold over the next five years. And, the number of devices connected to IP networks will be nearly three times as high as the global population in 2017.

As Candace London, senior vice president for Spectrum Commercial Real Estate Solutions concurred, the question from those seeking office space used to be: “does the building have high-speed Internet?” but in the near future, the question will be “is it cloud-ready?” So, yes, the ability to connect seamlessly to the cloud, via the Internet, is a 21st century essential.

While many service providers offer high-speed, broad-bandwidth network access, and others offer a full complement of cloud services, very few offer both. And those that do are finding growing numbers of customers, ready to sign up for their services.

Another important consideration is that today’s facilities don’t have to be physically located on a fiber optic network to access cloud services–as long as they are close. Many fiber providers are now extending their networks to “near-net” buildings that are a short distance (within 1,500 feet) of their fiber rings.

What exactly is a cloud-ready building? It has one or more providers who have installed high-speed connectivity to the building’s basement equipment room (on-net) or who, in a matter of days/weeks, can complete a build-out to connect the building to its nearby fiber-optic network ring (near-net).

As network connectivity to the building is being established, it is a relatively simple process of running the chosen fiber-optic network cables into the particular floor or suite requesting it. Then, the right network provider can optimize use of the network to take advantage of one or more cloud services—such as data storage, security and redundancy—that not only protect a company’s vital data, but enable fast access to it.

The reasons why so many companies are choosing cloud services are numerous. But most are directly or indirectly tied to the one factor that impacts most business decisions: money.

Cloud-readiness is increasingly viewed by many as a growth enabler for their organizations—both from an IT perspective because critical IT staff can shift from systems management functions to business process enhancement; and from an operations standpoint as business functions and workforce can grow quickly and efficiently.

Cloud computing reduces costs in a number of ways:

  • Lower Capital Costs. Companies that build and manage their own data rooms incur sizable upfront costs in purchasing the requisite equipment, along with the expense of ongoing maintenance fees. Those costs are almost eliminated by using the cloud.
  • Lower Utility Costs. Plenty of electricity and air conditioning is required to power and cool server rooms, and those fees can be reduced drastically if all or most IT assets are shifted to the cloud.
  • Real Estate Savings. Businesses can free up office space by moving the location of servers and other equipment typically needed when most IT management occurs on-site to an off-site location instead.
  • Personnel Savings. Whether using public cloud services, private cloud services, or a hybrid cloud solution, businesses require less headcount to monitor and manage the network.
  • Agility. Companies who contract for cloud services only pay for what they need on demand, and can usually, depending on the provider, quickly scale their IT infrastructure needs up or down based on seasonal growth patterns or other marketplace factors.

Cloud-readiness offers direct benefits to facilities managers, as management-specific applications to configure, monitor, and control building systems such as access security and energy management. Computerized maintenance and management applications (CMMS) have also moved to the cloud. These solutions help track repairs and preventive maintenance work orders as well as managing inventory and tracking building assets. There are also cloud based solutions for incident management, space planning, and visitor registration.

One of the biggest benefits of running building management applications in the cloud is anytime access to the application and to the alerts, analyses, and status reports they deliver. Managing buildings from the cloud also allows a facilities management team to manage multiple locations in real time from the central office.

Facility managers who embrace the importance of both high-speed networks and cloud based availability will find they have more time for forward thinking, because they can spend less time staying on top of management and maintenance issues.

 

Source: Today’s Facility Manager

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With The Internet Of Things, Smart Buildings Pose Big Risk

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In an Internet of Things (IoT) world, smart buildings with web-enabled technologies for managing heat, lighting, ventilation, elevators and other systems pose a more immediate security risk for enterprises than consumer technologies.

The increasing focus on making buildings more energy efficient, secure and responsive to changing conditions is resulting in a plethora of web-enabled technologies. Building management systems are not only more tightly integrated with each other, they are also integrated with systems outside the building, like the smart grid. The threat that such systems pose is two-fold, analysts said. Many of the web-enabled intelligent devices embedded in modern buildings have little security built into them, making them vulnerable to attacks that could disrupt building operations and pose safety risks. Web-connected, weakly protected building management systems also could provide a new way for malicious attackers to break into enterprise business systems that are on the same network.

The massive data theft at Target for instance, started with someone finding a way into the company’s network using the access credentials of a company that remotely maintained the retailer’s heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system. In Target’s case, the breach appears to have happened because the company did not properly segment its data network.  Such issues could become more common as buildings and management systems become increasingly intelligent and interconnected, said Hugh Boyes, cybersecurity lead at the U.K.’s Institution of Engineering and Technology.

“It creates some interesting challenges for enterprise IT,” Boyes said. “They need to know there are some increasingly complex networks being put into their buildings that are running outside their control. “As one example, Boyes pointed to the growing use of IP-enabled closed-circuit security cameras at many buildings. In some cases, the cameras might be used instead of a motion sensor to detect whether someone is in a room, and whether to keep the lights or heat turned on. In such a situation, the camera, the lighting and the heating systems would all need to be integrated. Each of the systems could also have web connectivity linking them with an external third party for maintenance and support purposes. “You quickly get into a situation where a network that was just inside the building goes to locations outside the building,” Boyes said.

It’s not only heating, lighting and security systems that are integrated in this manner. An elevator manufacturer might stick smart sensors on all the elevators in a building to detect and spot a failure before it happens. Or, a building manager might have technology in place to monitor and conserve water use in a facility. Many of these technologies will have a path out of the building and over an IP network to a third-party supplier or service provider, Boyes said. Often the data from these systems are captured not only for real-time decision support but also for longer-term data analytics.

Exacerbating the situation is the fact that many of the communications protocols for building automation and control networks, such as BACnet and LonTalk, are open and transparent, said Jim Sinopoli, managing principal at Smart Buildings LLC. Device manufacturers have adopted these protocols for product compatibility and interoperability purposes, Sinopoli said. However, the openness and transparency also increase the vulnerability of building automation networks. “None of these systems are isolated any longer,” Sinopoli said. A security breach in one system could have a cascading effect on multiple building automation systems and networks, he said.

The threat is not only about someone penetrating a building system to cause serious disruptions. There is also a potential impact on IT, such as a loss of communications due to a building system outage or unauthorized access to enterprise data because of poor segmentation between the building automation network and the IT network. “The penetration of IT into building systems is an issue that is front and center,” at a growing number of companies, Sinopoli said.

As buildings have become smarter, vendors of consumer devices have begun entering the space, said Rolf von Roessing, president of German security consulting company Forta AG and a member of ISACA’s Professional Influence and Advocacy Committee. ISACA is a trade group focused on IT governance issues, with 128,000 members. “Building automation, including critical functionality, is now readily available through web shops and hardware or electronics stores. While professional solutions usually feature in-built security and protection against hacking, consumer offerings are less well protected,” von Roessing said.

In terms of preparation, IT practitioners should extend their information security and cybersecurity management processes to cover buildings and building management systems, he said. “In many cases, these will be controlled through a Windows-based or compatible interface, using standard PC equipment and network connectivity via standard IP,” von Roessing said. “Where remote control is a known or desired feature, security practitioners should look long and hard at mobile devices, the remote control apps and underlying processes. If and where critical building functionality can be controlled and manipulated from an unprotected mobile device, there is a significant risk of breaches,” he said.

For a growing number of companies, the issue is already upon them, said John Pescatore, director of emerging security trends at SANS. In a SANS survey on the security of the Internet of Things, smart buildings and industrial control systems were the second most frequently cited near-term concern behind consumer devices, Pescatore said. Often, IT has little idea of the sheer scope of the issue, Pescatore said, He gave the example of one university’s chief information security officer at a recent SANS conference who ran a security scan of a new building on the campus. “In a single six-story building, he found nearly 1,500 sensors,” in elevators, doors, camera systems, lighting and heating systems and elsewhere, Pescatore said.

Traditionally, building management systems have not been considered IT systems. They are not selected by the CIO and have long been considered operational technology under the purview of building and facilities management teams. That attitude will have to change. Building management and IT organizations will need to work together to identify and mitigate potential risks, said Robert Stroud, the incoming international president of ISACA. But any response will need to be based on a thorough understanding of the risks, Stroud said. Companies will likely have to pay more attention to practices like network segmentation, strong authentication and network monitoring. Vendor management processes will need special attention, Stroud noted.

Many of the devices integrated in smart buildings have little security built into them and come from vendors that are unfamiliar to most IT organizations. Suppliers in the building automation world don’t have the same kind of processes in place that IT vendors do for responding to vulnerabilities in their products. Few have any notification process to let customers know about security threats to their products. IT organizations will need to work with building management teams to update vendor lists, build a register of contacts and know who to reach out to in case a response needs to be escalated, Stroud said.

 

Source: CiteWorld

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