PROTECTING YOUR BUSINESS
Ask any commercial real estate( CRE) owner about their building’ s boundaries and they can walk you through the survey without hesitation— the property line, the setbacks, the easement the utility company holds along the back corner. CRE runs on precisely defined boundaries. It’ s practically the first thing anyone learns in the business.
Ask the same owner where their HVAC controller sits on the network relative to their financial systems and the answer is almost always some version of“ I have no idea.” Not because it’ s unknowable but because nobody ever thought to ask anybody, including, in most cases, the vendor who installed it. Installed by default, not by design.
Here’ s what happens when a building management system( BMS) goes in. A vendor, whether HVAC, elevator, or access control, shows up to install their equipment and connect it to the network the way they always do. Unless someone explicitly says,“ Put this on its own segment, isolated from everything else,” it goes straight onto the same network running leasing platforms, financial systems, and tenant data.
This isn’ t a shortcut or a corner cut. It’ s simply the default behavior of an install with no instructions to the contrary. The vendor isn’ t doing anything wrong by their own standard— they were never told there was a line to respect in the first place. That missing line must come from somewhere, and the only party positioned to draw it is the building’ s owner, not the vendor who was never asked to.
In property terms, there’ s already a word for a structure that crosses a boundary nobody specified: an encroachment. It’ s not usually anyone’ s fault, in the sense of intent. It’ s what happens when a fence goes up before anyone pulled the survey. A BMS installed onto the primary network is the same event, just digital— a system crossing a line that was never drawn.
A fence built two feet over the property line eventually gets discovered— a sale triggers a new survey, a neighbor complains, somebody notices. Network encroachment has no equivalent trigger. The HVAC controller installed on the main network in 2019 is, most likely, still sitting exactly where it was installed. Nobody’ s gone back to segment it. Nobody’ s reviewed whether the vendor who set it up still needs the access they were given. Nobody’ s asked whether the elevator system talking to the same network as the leasing portal is fine, or just something nobody’ s gotten around to questioning.
That’ s the second half of the problem: a holdover. What started as an unremarkable installation default becomes, over years of inattention, a permanent and unexamined condition. The building operates normally. Nothing looks broken. And the boundary that should have existed from day one simply never gets drawn because no natural moment forces the question.
The holdover compounds in a specific, predictable way over time. Technicians move on to other jobs. Contracts get renegotiated. Vendors get replaced by competitors who win the next bid. Each of those ordinary business changes should trigger a corresponding change on the network— an old login disabled, a departing tech’ s access revoked, a former vendor’ s credentials closed out. In practice, it rarely does.
What’ s left behind is a system quietly populated with logins tied to people who no longer work on the account, sitting open and unwatched because closing them was never anyone’ s job. And because attention naturally follows what’ s visible, the systems those logins connect to are often the last in line for security patches— not out of neglect exactly, just because nobody’ s looking at them closely enough to notice they’ ve fallen behind. A holdover credential and an unpatched system tend to arrive together, and each one makes the other worse.
The instinct is to file this under“ IT problem, not my problem,” a technical detail for whoever manages the network to sort out eventually. That instinct is understandable and, in our experience, almost universally wrong for one specific reason: building systems and business systems increasingly live on the same digital footprint, and the failure mode isn’ t abstract. That’ s not just a cybersecurity concern. It’ s a question of operational resilience and how well a business can absorb and recover from disruptions that originate in systems nobody thought to watch.
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