Building A Digital Fortress

Smart Buildings Optimise Advanced Technologies Such As Iot-enabled Devices, Sensors And The Cloud To Effectively Monitor, Control And Enhance The Performance Of Building Systems. However, The Elements That Make A Building “Smart” Are Also What Makes It Vulnerable To Cyber-attacks.

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Few areas of technology capture the public’s imagination more than smart buildings, which are being developed in ever-greater numbers.

Indeed, market research suggests that the global market for smart buildings is growing by more than 30 percent a year.

Worth around $7 billion (Dh25.7 billion) in 2014, the market worldwide is forecast to be valued at as much as $36 billion (Dh132.2 billion) next year.

Investments are being made in smart systems that deal with everything from energy to escalators, from security to parking management.

This enthusiasm for smart buildings is not difficult to understand. Not only are they much more responsive to the needs of building users, helping to improve productivity and comfort, but they are, of course, also much more efficient, creating energy savings that translate into financial and environmental benefits.

As Juan Manuel Harán from the cybersecurity company ESET notes in a recent briefing document, the likes of security cameras, water management, ambient temperature and lighting can be controlled through Building Automation Systems (BAS).

These systems manage Internet of Things (IoT) devices that, equipped with sensors, can carry out monitoring, forecasting, analysis and diagnosis linked to the variables they control.

Professor Tarek Hassan, professor of construction informatics at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom, notes that smart buildings may give users a visualisation of how their interaction with the building affects that building’s performance.

“And then there’s IoT. If this is linked with other aspects of the user interface, like their smart TV, smart phone, coffee machine, it can be integrated so that user can, for example, see on their phone their energy usage,” he says.

“They can even control the heating and switch it up before they come home when they’re at work.”