Building automation security monitoring

A campus or large building runs on a building automation system. BAS and BMS controllers manage air handlers, boilers, chillers, pumps and lighting. Supervisory software and workstations sit above them. Field controllers speak protocols such as BACnet and Modbus.

Systems adjacent to access control, fire and life safety, and metering often ride the same or nearby networks. Facility OT monitoring means knowing what is on that network and when it changes.

Building systems get added by contractors and maintained by vendors with remote access. Many have default settings and long lives. They are often connected to the corporate network so facilities staff can reach them, and the people who own them are not the security team.

For a data center, loss of cooling is an outage. For a hospital facility, loss of environmental control affects the building people depend on. We make no healthcare compliance claims. We monitor the building control network and escalate what looks wrong.

• Vendor and contractor remote access to BMS servers.
• Controllers appearing on networks they should not.
• Supervisory workstations reaching out to unusual destinations.
• Chiller and air handler controllers receiving unexpected commands.

Facilities staff keep buildings running. IT security staff keep the corporate network safe. A BMS cybersecurity monitoring platform sits between them, and its alerts can land with no clear owner.

ForgeSOC reads those alerts, adds asset and network context, and escalates to the right person on your side by agreed procedure, including after hours.

We do not deploy your platform, tune it extensively, perform forensics or run response. We never write to a controller. If your building network was never fully mapped, we can scope a readiness project to fix that before monitoring begins.

The hardest part of building system monitoring is often ownership. Onboarding fixes that on paper. We review your platform, identify which segments are mechanical, access-adjacent or metering, and agree who gets each type of alert.

We connect read-only through your secure remote access platform, write runbooks with your facilities and security leads, review the baseline of current alerts, and run a test escalation. After that, analysts watch the hours you choose and escalate by the procedure you approved.

Campuses with a central plant, several buildings and a mix of vendor systems are a good fit. So is a single large facility with a small IT team.

Legacy matters here. Building controllers often run for decades, and protocols like BACnet were designed for convenience, not for hostile networks. A passive platform does not need to change any of that. It watches, and ForgeSOC reads what it reports, so a supervisor workstation scanning the controller network at three in the morning does not wait until the facilities manager opens email.