Editor’s note: FM Perspectives are industry op-eds. The views expressed are the authors’ and do not necessarily reflect those of Facilities Management Advisor.
I was on a call with an operations director at a big ag plant. She’d been running the place for years, knew her equipment inside and out. Her question was one I hear in every industry now: “Why does a dairy farm need cybersecurity?”
Her facility converts manure into biogas—methane that powers generators and feeds electricity back into the grid. The process depends on networked control systems monitoring gas pressure, temperature, and flow rates. Every one of those systems has an IP address. She knew that. What she hadn’t considered was that each one could be compromised remotely.
One bad configuration change, one unauthorized login, and you’re looking at gas leaks. Explosive conditions. A failure that doesn’t just halt production—it puts people in danger.
That dairy farm isn’t unusual. It’s a pattern I see everywhere. The physical systems that keep buildings, plants, and campuses running safely are now networked, remotely accessible, and exposed to the same cyber threats as your e-mail server. Most facility teams don’t realize it yet.
Your Building Runs on Code—and Most of It Isn’t Protected
When facilities managers think about risk, they think about HVAC failures, fire suppression, elevator maintenance, roof leaks. Physical stuff. That instinct made sense when building systems were standalone. Today, those same systems sit on IP networks. Building automation systems, access control panels, energy management platforms, security cameras. They’re all connected. Many of them share the corporate network with accounting, HR, and e-mail.
I ran a webinar with a water treatment facility about their monitoring infrastructure. Not the big pipes—the sensors that tell operators if tap water is safe to drink. Toxin levels, sanitization percentages. The system reads everything and reports back: “We’re at 85%. All clear.”
Those sensors connect to the corporate network. An attacker who gains access can alter what gets reported without changing what’s actually happening. The dashboard reads 85% safe while the real contamination level sits at 45%. People drink tainted water. Every screen shows green.
You can’t patch these systems the way IT patches a laptop. Many run decades-old operating systems that were never designed to be updated. They just execute whatever they were built to execute, for as long as they’re powered on. A facilities team that doesn’t know these devices are on the network can’t protect them. And right now, most don’t.
When the Wrong Scan Shuts Down a Factory
Earlier in my career, I worked at a major vulnerability management company. We had an automotive client, one of the largest manufacturers in the world. An engineer was testing a new product and ran what he thought was a routine IT scan. He pointed it at the robotic assembly systems.
The entire factory shut down. C-suite executives flew in from headquarters. The engineer had no idea what happened. He assumed he was scanning normal IT equipment.
But those robots weren’t just building cars. They operated alongside human workers, welding, cutting, pressing at thousands of pounds of force. When they shut down without warning, when they stop responding to safety commands, people get hurt. That’s not a data breach. That’s a workplace injury. And it happened because someone treated an operational system like an IT asset.
Facilities professionals manage environments where this distinction matters every day. The chiller plant, the fire alarm panel, the elevator controller—these aren’t servers. They can’t be rebooted on a whim. They can’t be taken offline for a Tuesday patch window. And when they fail unexpectedly, the consequences are physical.
Life and Death at 60 MPH
Years ago, I closed the biggest account of my career—a major theme park operator. The executive on the call got emotional. He told me, “Our jobs are life and death. We don’t just secure rides.”
He was talking about their flagship attraction. Children as young as five, strapped into seats, flying through the air at 60 mph, 200 feet off the ground. The control systems managing speed, braking, and restraint mechanisms are networked. They’re exposed to the same types of attacks that hit corporate e-mail. Except here, a compromised system governs physics: momentum, G-forces, the limits of the human body.
Theme parks might seem like an edge case, but the principle applies to any facility where networked systems control something physical. Elevators. Loading dock doors. HVAC in a hospital where temperature-sensitive medications are stored. Automated warehouse conveyors moving at speed near workers. If the system can move, heat, cool, pressurize, or restrain, and it’s on a network, it’s a cyber risk with physical consequences.
The starting point for any facility team is the same one that the plant director took: Ask the basic questions. Which devices on your network control a physical process? Which ones could hurt someone if they malfunctioned or were tampered with? If you don’t have answers, that’s the gap to close first. You can’t scan these systems like servers or fail them over like cloud apps. They need different tools, different protocols, and a different kind of attention. The kind facilities teams are best positioned to give—once they know what they’re looking at.
As the field chief information security officer (CISO) at global systems integrator Myriad360, Jeremy Ventura is a seasoned cybersecurity professional and advisor, specializing in information security best practices, driving defense strategies, and safeguarding organizations against evolving threats. With extensive experience in vulnerability management, API security, email security, incident response, and security center operations, he has honed his expertise through roles at premier security vendors and internal security teams. Follow Ventura on LinkedIn here.