Smart Buildings are driving an increased need for reliability
As the environmental and security demands upon building infrastructures get increasingly complex there is an opportunity to rethink the approach to how buildings are managed. Today’s buildings and campuses support a wide range of control systems – access, environmental, video monitoring, energy efficiency, and more. These solutions are typically deployed in a stove pipe fashion on disparate platforms and this lack of integration has led to complexity, high costs and lost efficiencies.
In this next era of the Smart Building, the situation is changing fast and there are three technologies enabling this:
IoT (Internet of Things) devices – In the past the endpoint devices such as cameras, badge readers and thermostats in a building were proprietary and expensive. The introduction of low cost devices coupled with the adoption of consistent communications standards is resulting in more devices and increased integration between systems.
Virtualization – One of the things that has held back virtualization and the integration of building technologies has been the requirement for each solution to have its own unique infrastructure. Now that the devices are IoT based, this presents an opportunity to simplify the building infrastructure and lower costs through virtualization.
Analytics – The analysis of data from the increased number of end devices can lead to changes to business processes to drive efficiencies and manage cost.
These three advances are enabling the Smart Building, but the true core of Smart Building technology is the control applications that collect the IoT device data and transforms that data into analytics. In addition, these control applications may also have a role in managing the IoT endpoint devices and enabling audits and compliance in critical locations.
