By Gary Kinghorn
Director, Marketing
Tempered Networks

As a network security technology vendor, it’s a hard realization to admit. For decades our networks have not been effective at security. Security is too expensive, tedious, error-prone, and often lags the latest threats and zero-day attacks. Because of recent advancements in business, including the drive for digital transformation, and other areas of networking and cloud technology, that fact is becoming even more apparent. As technology advances, so does the sophistication of attacks against our most critical infrastructure. Somewhere along the way, hackers started winning more of the battles.

And now today, we are seeing the opportunity for a more connected world; of smarter devices, buildings, cities and infrastructure. We have the opportunity for making better use of living spaces, being more efficient, automating many tedious tasks, to leverage more data in more intelligent ways for better lives and a better world. But the vulnerability of those networks and those devices is holding us back from the advancements we could be making.

Virtually every internet connected device critical to our well-being, whether it’s security cameras, wastewater treatment valves, manufacturing robots, office lights or heating and air-conditioning systems, to name just a few, is being probed and attacked by unauthorized hackers hundreds of times per day. We have seen our most trusted infrastructure, such as trusted network monitoring software that has visibility to entire networks be severely compromised with back-doors allowing attackers to completely compromise all applications and data traffic to hundreds of organizations. All while we are trying to connect tens of millions more IoT devices in the coming years.

Fortunately, there is hope. Advances in network security methodology are moving organizations to Zero Trust security models, where broad spectrum attacks can be virtually eliminated, on any kind of network, even for older, legacy devices and applications. Where Zero Trust networks can be deployed and maintained amid existing infrastructure and IT processes, while still meeting remote access and data sharing requirements, there is a real chance to safely and efficiently implement digital transformation and smart building goals.

This is where Intelligent Buildings is making great strides to overcome these security obstacles for the critical commercial real-estate market. Smart buildings are comprised of a wide range of individual intelligent systems such as parking controls, lighting, solar arrays, HVAC, physical entry controls, and more. By providing a turn-key managed service that allows the required connectivity of these Operational Technology (OT) networks to the IT infrastructure, along with the required identity-based remote access solutions for technicians and service providers to access relevant equipment, Intelligent Buildings is helping building owners, operators and REITs achieve their vision for digital transformation and automation.

Tempered Networks is pleased to provide a key component of Intelligent Buildings’ managed security service offerings and help their customers along this digital transformation journey. As a technology provider, we rely on partners with the expertise and contacts in markets such as this to deliver our solutions effectively. Intelligent Buildings is providing tremendous value-add on top of what we could deliver alone, and will continue to be a valuable channel for us to grow our business going forward.