The efficiency and effectiveness of your building performance relies on two key players: your Information Technology (IT) team, and your facilities department responsible for Operational Technology (OT). And while these two groups ultimately share the same goals—to keep your building and all its systems safe, sound, and up and running—they don’t always see eye to eye when it comes to achieving those goals.
In fact, an IDC study found that 37.2% of building stakeholders pointed to the expertise gap between IT teams and facilities departments as their most pressing challenge. What’s more, 30.6% of those surveyed said that organizational complexity and conflicting decision-making between IT and facilities are a major hinderance in building performance. So, what exactly is going on?
The Impact of IT and OT Conflict on Building Performance
Clearly, there’s conflict between IT teams and facilities departments in charge of OT—the hardware and software that enable the monitoring, control, and management of physical devices, equipment, processes, and infrastructure that keep buildings running. The widespread adoption of Building Automation Systems (BAS) has only added to the issue.
This friction between IT teams and facilities managers focused on OT is likely costing you in lost productivity, unnecessary labor, increased vulnerabilities, and inefficiencies—all of which impact building performance and the bottom line. To address and resolve the issue, we must first understand the key sources of the friction and why they exist. Let’s start with the why.
How IT and OT Became Interconnected
Historically, facilities departments have shouldered the responsibility for ensuring the continued operation of building systems—electrical, plumbing, HVAC, lighting, elevators, sensors, alarms, structural components, and more—while also maintaining occupied space comfort. These systems fall under the category of OT, the main purview of facilities.
Over the past decade, however, the realms of IT and OT have converged, becoming enmeshed. As buildings become smarter and more automated with BAS, many of those building automation platforms now run on the business’s IT infrastructure. As a result, IT teams now share the burden of monitoring and managing OT with the facilities department. This becomes an issue when IT teams don’t always understand how OT systems work, and facilities departments don’t always understand the complexities and priorities of IT.
The shift to interconnected buildings explains why IT and OT have now come into conflict. Now let’s take a look at five specific areas of conflict that may be having a direct impact on your building performance, productivity, and efficiency.
1. Differing Priorities between IT and Facilities
2. OT Vulnerabilities Become IT Headlines
3. Centralization of Building Data Vs. Localized Control
4. Added OT Responsibilities for IT Teams
5. Avoiding Infrastructure Downtime and Ensuring Continuity
Conflict 1: Differing Priorities between IT and Facilities
The reality is, OT remains unfamiliar and even baffling territory for IT teams. While IT staff are intimately versed in many acronyms, the abbreviations BAS, BMS, DDC, and SCADA may not be among them. IT teams don’t realize the impact of vulnerability scans on OT systems and hardware, or how to conduct penetration testing on OT devices without interrupting them. They also have no idea how long a normal construction cycle is, or which players or interests are involved.
Understandably, your IT team is focused on making sure your infrastructure and systems are up-to-date, secure, and hardened against risk. Your facilities department, on the other hand, is likely more concerned about stability and reliability; in other words, making sure your building and its systems stay up and running. As such, facilities take a more cautious approach than IT when it comes to embracing new technology. For facilities, a 15-year life cycle is common. In the world of IT, it’s unheard of. These entirely different approaches to technology often come into direct conflict with each other.
Conflict 2: OT Vulnerabilities Become IT Headaches
According to a 2024 Fortinet study, 73% of organizations around the world reported cyber intrusions that impacted either OT systems alone, or both OT and IT systems. That same study found that around 37% of ransomware attacks on facilities affected both IT and OT environments.
There’s no denying that OT systems running on IT networks bring with them an increased risk of cyberthreats and vulnerabilities. For your IT team, this means added responsibilities for ensuring OT systems are protected and secure from cyberattacks. Your facilities department, on the other hand, is more focused on the physical safety of buildings and people, and on ensuring continuity. As such, facilities managers often view OT as critical to their jobs without understand the risks involved with running OT on IT networks.
Facilities departments are starting to realize the risks as well. According to a Honeywell survey, seven in 10 facilities managers are worried about the lack of operational cybersecurity to protect their buildings. And approximately 27% of facilities managers experienced a cyberattack in the last 12 months. As a result, two-thirds of facilities managers now consider managing OT cybersecurity as one of the most challenging parts of their jobs. That’s something both facilities and IT teams have in common.
Conflict 3: Centralization of Building Data Vs. Localized Control
Given the nature of their responsibilities—monitoring and managing your building’s critical business infrastructure— your IT team prefers to follow strict protocols. They want standardization and centralized control for all networks, data flows, and digital assets, along with visibility across all these systems. All understandable.
Your facilities department, in contrast, may approach their critical work—keeping your building running and comfortable for occupants—with more of a whatever-it-takes attitude. That often includes using workarounds that IT teams don’t always approve of.
Add to that, facilities often rely on a mishmash of legacy systems and purpose-built devices that are by no means standardized. Given the round-the-clock mobility requirements of facilities staff, they want localized control and remote access to building data, on-demand, to solve specific issues as they come up. This creates another security headache for IT.
Conflict 4: Added OT Responsibilities for IT Teams
IT teams have many responsibilities, including meeting a Zero Trust mandate for securing digital assets while satisfying insurance company requirements. As such, IT staff must make sure that all OT systems are safely integrated with the IT infrastructure—or else, completely isolated from it.
Along with integration, IT teams are often asked to oversee OT system upgrades and migrations, on top of the business systems they’re already responsible for. Which means the IT staff must also keep track of additional vendors, service contracts, and service level agreements.
When it comes time to upgrade and improve OT systems connected to the IT network, the IT team often finds themselves struggling to identify who owns what system and which data. IT staff may end up having to interconnect data across systems they’re unfamiliar with. On top of all that, IT managers can find it difficult to justify the cost of upgrades and improvements to OT systems they may not view as core to the infrastructure.
Conflict 5: Avoiding Infrastructure Downtime and Ensuring Continuity
According to a global survey, IT teams spend the equivalent of 12 hours per 40-hour work week addressing interruptions mostly caused by network failure. IT downtime costs businesses $376.66 million annually, and 62% of surveyed respondents said high-business-impact outages cost their organization at least $1 million per hour of downtime.
When IT and OT are enmeshed on the same network, IT teams are tasked with keeping OT systems up and running as well. This increases the chance of disruptive and costly operational downtime, while increasing the burden of ensuring business continuity on the shoulders of IT staff.
The Solution: Separate IT and OT with a Private Cloud Service
More than a breakdown in communication, conflict between IT teams and facilities departments accountable for OT can have a significant and costly impact on your building and business productivity, efficiency, and security. Addressing and remediating this conflict is key, but the question now is: How?
Identifying the points of friction between IT and OT is the first step. In the next installment of our series on resolving IT and OT conflict, we’ll be delving into an elegant solution: separating IT and OT with a Private Cloud Service. Stay tuned for more.
In the meantime, you can download and read our comprehensive white paper on Private Cloud Service as the solution to IT/OT conflict here.
