Harvesting and analyzing building data has become an essential task for those who work with building owners seeking to improve energy efficiency, reduce operational costs, and meet sustainability goals. At ACE IoT Solutions, we often refer to ourselves as “data plumbers” for such buildings. Indeed, at the upcoming CxEnergy conference in Dallas, we will give away mini plungers to underscore the “we get the data flowing” role that we can play for building optimization specialists, sustainability advisors, building commissioning agents, CEMs, and other consultants to building owners.

OK, a cute moniker, you might say, but what does being a data plumber really mean? Certainly, it’s someone who can navigate the complex landscape of building automation systems (BAS), OT networks, independent data layers (IDLs), and data analytics tools. But let’s go further in depth. To us, there are four key steps or responsibilities of data plumbers for buildings.

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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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