The Rise of Smart Buildings

At the start of 2023, I left the physical security market where I have been an experienced professional for more than 25 years to go into a different world that for me is uncharted territory but at the same time somewhat familiar. I am talking about the smart building market. To make an analogy to a popular sci-fi movie, I chose the red pill and woke up into a new reality that I have been learning every day since.

What exactly is a smart building? If you have not been entirely exposed to this industry yet, you may be thinking it is a larger-scale version of a smart home with everything interconnected. That answer is close to the truth, but it is much more and evolving based on a series of ongoing events.

In the last few years ESG business needs, stricter environmental regulations and the COVID pandemic have all combined into the perfect storm driving market demand for smart buildings designers to create solutions like never before. Whether the use case is energy savings, optimizing floor space, creating a healthier work environment or better visitor experience, smart building solutions need to utilize all data in a building, and most are not doing it yet. Here lies the challenge and opportunity for physical security but let’s talk more about smart buildings first.

What Is a Smart Building

A basic definition of a smart building is a building that integrates data from different systems together to create a better real estate space for owners, occupants, and the environment.

You may be asking yourself what this has to do with physical security solutions but keep reading.

While smart buildings in the past may have been thought of as a futuristic concept not worth the time and money to implement, three main areas have contributed to stakeholders in the commercial real estate industry thinking differently:

Environmentally driven government regulations: Decarbonization, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions produced by the combustion of fossil fuels, has been a global initiative. Within the U.S. it is not only being driven by the U.S. Department of Energy at the federal level but by certain states such as California that have Title 24 driving new building energy efficiency standards which are updated every three years.

Cities are also driving change like NYC Local Law 97 which states that buildings over 25,000 square feet will be required to meet new energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions limits by 2024, with stricter limits coming into effect in 2030. Without burning fossil fuels onsite, most buildings will need to provide space and water heating using electricity instead, which includes energy efficiency programs. To make the situation even more complicated, electric cars are becoming more widespread and even mandated in years to come meaning some buildings will have higher energy demands just when they worked to reduce energy consumption.

ESG business needs: The term  Environmental. Social and Governance or ESG became officially mainstream in 2005 as part of a report from the United Nations encouraging all business stakeholders to embrace the concept. It has evolved to become a set of best practices (policies, procedures, metrics, etc.) used by companies and investors alike as another measurement of business health. ESG is driving Smart Buildings technology adoption as its’ core principles include not only understanding the impact a business has on the global external environment but also the social health environment within an internal building workspace. Today, many companies are including ESG as a key ROI criterion to mitigate business risk and prepare for the future.

The COVID pandemic has created a new normal in so many ways. Many employees changed to a hybrid work model of coming into the office only 2-3 days a week or not at all. This shift has left building owners and facility managers with the difficult task of not only evaluating how to best optimize office space to save on costs but also transforming the workplace into an environment that makes employees want to come into the office versus staying at home more. Also, while most people no longer wear masks, many are much more health conscious, especially when it comes to air quality. While COVID brought this to the top of mind, air quality continues to be a topic of conversation. A perfect example is the recent fires from Canada that resulted in record low air quality indexes in major cities in the northeast.

So, what does all this have to do with physical security? The answer is that smart buildings are still looking for more data to achieve objectives and physical security is one area that has been untapped because of artificial silos. The data created from systems like video surveillance and access control are primarily used for security use cases like finding a suspect or managing building access, but they can be used for so much more by looking at the data they create through a non-security lens. Here is a real example.

A key part of any smart building has been to use occupancy data to automatically adjust lighting and sometimes HVAC to save on energy and reduce carbonization. If no one is in a space, then there is no need to have the lights on to max illumination. If someone enters a space, besides the lights coming on, the temperature should adjust, and fresh air pulled in if carbon dioxide levels are excessive. Occupancy sensors used in building automation work well to determine when a space is occupied or unoccupied but traditional PIR-based sensors even augmented with acoustics data cannot estimate the number of people in a space.

Both video and access control solutions can easily provide accurate counts using AI-enabled video analytics and door entry access counts. Integrating this data can make a big difference in both energy savings and providing a better occupant experience. Within the smart building world, I have shared this concept to start integrating video data and have received pushback that no building owner will use cameras to count people because of privacy issues. Be ready to explain that AI-based people counting data is anonymized to not compromise Personal Identifiable Information (PII) and that every facility already has cameras installed in common areas that can be dual-purposed for both security and occupancy.

Using data from a security system to save energy on HVAC and lighting is not the only way to look at this. What about using the data from Building Automation systems for security applications? Video surveillance systems are often configured to record motion similar to occupancy sensors. Besides occupancy data, what about other data generated from sensors measuring light, audio and air quality levels? Couldn’t anomalies from building automation data be considered an event requiring security intervention like when smoke or fire is detected? With a few exceptions, most physical security systems do not tap into this data, which is another missed opportunity.

In the last decade, we have seen the convergence of physical and IT security which done correctly starts with bringing teams together to pool their experience, resources and plans to create an integrated solution. While the technology and use cases in the smart building world are different, they are similar enough that this new convergence can make smart buildings even smarter. Done correctly, the cross-utilization of data sources from different systems offers a strong ROI for everyone involved but it starts with eliminating silos.

Beyond Security

The next time a project or bid spec crosses your desk, don’t just think security. Think about how this is an opportunity to create a better building for owners, occupants, and the environment.

From a security market perspective, this new approach offers both security integrators the possibility to broaden the scope of their services to not only new customers but customers they already have and security managers with a compelling new ROI to convince CFOs to make investments not based on typical security safeguards alone.

Welcome to the new world.