Why Smart Buildings
SMART buildings bridge the gap between IT and OT and align them with the business’s vision and goals, whilst also providing a positive modern user experience for the occupants.
What Is A Smart Building?
A SMART building can be described as any building that uses automated processes to automatically control a building’s operations, such as heating, ventilation, air-conditioning, security and other IT systems.
Now consider the following:
- A converged IT/OT network that is flexible, resilient and secure. Infrastructure silos are no longer enough to balance regulatory requirements (Covid-19, social distancing etc) with user expectations (individual control eg change setpoints etc).
- Being able to maintain a secure, but flexible IT infrastructure as remote working becomes increasingly prevalent. Device management and seamless integration of office applications need to be the norm in order to maintain employee productivity and retention.
- A thoughtful working environment for staff, for example, so they can book meeting rooms, car park spaces, or their weekly hot desks via an app.
- Being able to respond to real-time operating conditions and more effective use of utilities: turning off lights in empty rooms, turning down the heat as the outside warms up, thereby reducing costs and meeting environmental needs.
- Immediate response to cybersecurity threats, however and wherever they are detected. These can be detected not only through email/firewalls on the corporate networks but also via building networks too.
- The entire converged IT/OT network managed through a product-agnostic, AI-enabled middleware platform - a single pane of glass.
A new generation SMART building can adapt quickly to changing space requirements, due to the secure wireless infrastructure. New OT technologies can be utilised and controllers can be auto-discovered and plug straight into pre-build control templates from the middleware platform.
We can finally say ‘plug and play’ and not ‘plug and pray’ in the SMART building world.