The ART of Building Sustainability #2: Secure data

In 2019 Reliable Controls thoughtfully developed a concept called the ART of Building Sustainability—nine elements of building sustainability that guide the work of Reliable Controls team members and the evolution of its products. 

Perhaps more poignant than ever before in our industry is the need for improved information security and improved integrity of scalable network infrastructure. Highly integrated HVAC, lighting, and security solutions from a single vendor have the inherent advantage of being able to benefit from a consistent security-hardening strategy across all building systems. Multi-vendor designs, on the other hand, may introduce unintended systemic security weaknesses implemented in work-arounds used to bridge independent or isolated credentialing and encryption methods—silos of inconsistent security and credentialing processes. Improved solutions employ a single sign on (SSO) architecture with good compliance to IT best practices, implementing scalable credentialing architectures such as LDAP and SAML. Although new efforts such as BACnet’s Secure Connect (BACnet/SC) are actively being developed to provide a standardized means to create secure communication connections across the internet and within buildings, other vendors have already developed and implemented effective solutions that resolve this connection issue today. These solutions create scalable and secure private networks that tunnel through public networks, using BACnet Virtual Private Networks (B/VPN).