Over the past 4 months, ACE IoT’s data acquisition technology has been successfully deployed in a growing number of hospitals and institutions of higher education. In fact, we can report – proudly- that ACE IoT’s Managed Cloud Platform now delivers into SkySpark more than 1 million data points from hospitals. To deploy our edge gateways in these institutional networks, ACE IoT completed vetting processes that included meeting with each institution and having them evaluate our systems and the cybersecurity mitigation we have in place. For one of the deployments, we were asked to complete standardized cybersecurity review known as the HECVAT.

Since completing the HECVAT, we have since shared our completed HECVAT with other institutions where we will deploy—whether they have required it or not! In this blog post, we’ll discuss the value of have an approved data acquisition gateway on the network, we’ll nerd-out about the HECVATi and illustrate why we think a standardized cybersecurity review will help accelerate the deployment of innovative smart technologies in buildings.

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Over the last 4+ years, we have heard a lot of HVAC data acquisition horror stories. Tales involving unyielding IT departments, seemingly habitually broken VPNs and less-than-easy-to-work-with controls vendors. Perhaps the most disquieting of all are the horror stories involving efforts to acquire data that – rather than improve the operation of HVAC systems - overwhelm the OT network and bog-down the system in data requests. As my mother-in-law is wont to say, “it can feel like no good deed goes unpunished.”

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For the last decade, smart building technology has been transforming the role of building commissioning agents, Certified Energy Managers (CEMs), and sustainability advisors in the commercial real estate industry. One area that has evolved is monitoring-based commissioning (MBCx) – a process that involves continuously monitoring and analyzing the performance of a building’s systems to identify opportunities for energy efficiency improvements and to optimize their operation. Adoption of MBCx has been limited because MBCx was seen as complex to implement.Many CEMs and Cx professionals concluded that, when it comes to MBCx, the juice was not worth the squeeze.

Acquiring the HVAC and operations data from a building or campus, for example, required specialized equipment and personnel trained on arcane BAS and HVAC systems. From ACE IoT’s perspective, the five smart building trends we outline below stand to change the calculus regarding MBCx and other building optimization approaches. We see a growing opportunity for CEMs, Cx professionals and sustainability advisors to help their clients improve the energy efficiency and sustainability of their buildings.

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