The Rise of Smart Buildings

The Rise of Smart Buildings

Building-automation systems used to function in separate technology silos. Now vendors are rapidly adopting IP, Web services and other technologies that are beginning to converge with traditional IT infrastructures.

http://www.computerworld.com/network...100318,00.html

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And the management of BAS is likely to increasingly fall to IT.

"IT folks are entering an era where virtually everything is converging in their direction, and it broadens their horizons tremendously," says Rick LeBlanc, president of HVAC products at Siemens Building Technologies in Buffalo Grove, Ill. IT won't operate BASs, but it will serve the facilities staff as a customer in much the same way it does accounting and other departments today, he says.

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But sharing the IP backbone raises security concerns among network administrators. Yale University is starting a project to consolidate its BAS onto an IP network that will link 210 campus buildings, and it plans to tie the BAS into a room-scheduling system that will automatically control energy usage based on room occupancy. For security reasons, Bill Daniels, manager of systems and technologies for the university's facilities group, has created an isolated, parallel network that's protected by firewalls and uses nonroutable IP addresses to keep data off the Internet.

Jerry Hill, director of systems engineering at Yale, says security is paramount. "We don't want a student to hack into our building management systems just because they can," he says.

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I'm sure that there will be lots of students trying just that. Looks like a looming security nightmare with that many networked devices.

I don’t know I don’t like the idea of connecting to many things on a network, the more things that are connected the more security you need. Also most inventors will try to integrate every thing into computers to try and make life easer for people and most people will want that but what they don’t see is that most things get first implemented with out proper security and something like this will only cause more problems because once some one gets into the system they pretty much own your hole life and in a real way because if some one steals your identity they cant control your heat or electricity use, its scary to think about what could happen if something like this is put into use wide spread.

It would suck if you lost your heat and hydro to a computer virus. I'm sure some people would try to exploit everything they could.

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IT won't operate BASs, but it will serve the facilities staff as a customer in much the same way it does accounting and other departments today

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One more thing to learn on the fly.

Of course this could improve your chances for that FAT raise you wanted, by getting the network back online, and getting your elevator with your boss in it, unstuck from the 40th floor :)

He'd never need to know you stopped it in the first place..... :O