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Owner Signal: The BAS Reboot - A Cross-Departmental Problem
A building owner recently told us about the nightmare they lived through last winter. The freeze stats on a bank of air handlers tripped overnight, forcing them to shut down to protect against pipe bursts. The sequences controlling them were written in the 1990s. The software supervising them reached end of life in 2018. No alarm reached anyone, because nobody is capable of watching the old system that closely. By morning, rooms had reached frigid temperatures, and a lab's worth of research was gone.
The building itself wasn't being neglected — it contained fully functioning laboratories with modern equipment and important experiments. What was neglected, however, was the HVAC controls and building automation system (BAS) that survived despite years of upgrades to the rest of the building.
The nightmare equipment failure is just one of many reasons why building owners are pleading for upgraded controls in their buildings. About 30% of the building owners we've interviewed this year consider it one of their top priorities. Below, we discuss why the “BAS Reboot” is still front of mind for building owners, why it's so damn hard to execute, and how we plan to create an environment that addresses the problem head-on at NexusCon (spoiler alert: it's usually a people problem).
A common reason facility managers, like the one with the freeze stat disaster above, require new controls is that they simply cannot effectively get useful data their team can act on out of the system. That particular FM told us that they “have [legacy controllers speaking a proprietary protocol] mixed with BACnet, which makes it hard to pull reports, very hard to do anything”. The freeze stats that tripped produced an alarm, but that alarm went into a bank of hundreds of alarms that sat on a single desktop of the legacy system, which no one had the capacity to check. The push to IP-based controllers is the most straightforward evolution towards a system that can more easily display and exchange data with the rest of your building.
Even if you can get data into an alert that your team can act upon, many teams are simply struggling with a lack of autonomy to control their own destiny with controls. One FM leading a multinational bank's connected buildings program described their largest blocker: “decisions are made by vendors who often are leading on selection and outcomes rather than internal ownership.”
But this problem is far from just an FM problem. Operational technology (OT) systems have become a primary cyber threat target, and aging, unsupported BAS on a building network is a major exposure (we have many examples). The challenge is that the cybersecurity team that wants to mitigate this risk and the FM team that uses the system daily aren't collaborating in most organizations. One healthcare FM, when asked about his BAS upgrade plans, told us “the IT industry has become so difficult to work within, that we needed to take our own path in regard to IP communications.” Typical IT approaches to cybersecurity simply don't translate well to the world of OT devices. While both groups may want to renew the BAS, they struggle to get on the same page about how to do so.
Then, there are all the groups that rely on the BAS data and control as the foundation for other jobs to be done. An energy manager at a leading research university described their main blocker as, “silos across all of our OT systems and owners that don't allow us to find efficiency opportunities”. When an energy manager is pressed by rising utility costs and sustainability goals, their ability to find and deploy vast efficiency solutions is completely hamstrung by the lack of BAS data and control. We described this in our last NexusCast as the “energy management hierarchy of needs”.
Finally, all the stakeholders above may want an upgraded BAS, but they often don't control the budget to make one happen. The capital planning department listens to the plea for modern controls, then has to weigh that against the million other demands the organization is feeling, most of which are far more noticeable than the nearly invisible control system that sits above the ceiling tile and on the basement desktop. And if older buildings do get the nod for a BAS upgrade, it's often treated as incremental because of lack of budget and resources, which can leave you in a worse position. Our FM from the freeze stat story, who found his buildings in a state of half-migrated, told us, “the new construction demand we had this year made it impossible for us to migrate old controls entirely, so the migration just crept…. Looking back, we probably shouldn't have done it this way”.
What's described above is not too many cooks in the kitchen; it's a bunch of cooks not operating within the same kitchen.
👩🍳Cook #1 is the facility manager > responsible for the emergencies the BAS produces, but lacks budget and autonomy to make the system work effectively.
👩🍳Cook #2 is the cybersecurity lead > aware of the vulnerabilities that an end-of-life BAS imposes, but doesn't understand how the FM uses the tool and what their requirements are.
👩🍳Cook #3 is the energy manager > trying to eliminate mountains of energy waste, but the levers they can pull are disparate, tiny, and provide no insights.
👩🍳Cook #4 is the capital planner > aware of the plea for modernized controls, but hears it as only one demand across the masses, and the squeakiest wheel gets the grease.
The thesis of NexusCon 2026 is to solve problems by bringing the cooks into the same kitchen. Interdepartmental sessions allow all stakeholders to understand the problem from the perspective of their peers. The “BAS Reboot” session will do just this, bringing together facility managers, cybersecurity experts, energy managers, and capital planners into the same room to find harmonious approaches to solving the problem. It is one of 4 sessions we are specifically crafting to analyze the gaps between the departments that make Connected Buildings a reality.
Will you be there?
Are you tackling a BAS modernization project? Want help? We're happy to point you in the right direction. Our quick concierge form is the first step.
Sign up for the newsletter to get stories like this biweekly:
A building owner recently told us about the nightmare they lived through last winter. The freeze stats on a bank of air handlers tripped overnight, forcing them to shut down to protect against pipe bursts. The sequences controlling them were written in the 1990s. The software supervising them reached end of life in 2018. No alarm reached anyone, because nobody is capable of watching the old system that closely. By morning, rooms had reached frigid temperatures, and a lab's worth of research was gone.
The building itself wasn't being neglected — it contained fully functioning laboratories with modern equipment and important experiments. What was neglected, however, was the HVAC controls and building automation system (BAS) that survived despite years of upgrades to the rest of the building.
The nightmare equipment failure is just one of many reasons why building owners are pleading for upgraded controls in their buildings. About 30% of the building owners we've interviewed this year consider it one of their top priorities. Below, we discuss why the “BAS Reboot” is still front of mind for building owners, why it's so damn hard to execute, and how we plan to create an environment that addresses the problem head-on at NexusCon (spoiler alert: it's usually a people problem).
A common reason facility managers, like the one with the freeze stat disaster above, require new controls is that they simply cannot effectively get useful data their team can act on out of the system. That particular FM told us that they “have [legacy controllers speaking a proprietary protocol] mixed with BACnet, which makes it hard to pull reports, very hard to do anything”. The freeze stats that tripped produced an alarm, but that alarm went into a bank of hundreds of alarms that sat on a single desktop of the legacy system, which no one had the capacity to check. The push to IP-based controllers is the most straightforward evolution towards a system that can more easily display and exchange data with the rest of your building.
Even if you can get data into an alert that your team can act upon, many teams are simply struggling with a lack of autonomy to control their own destiny with controls. One FM leading a multinational bank's connected buildings program described their largest blocker: “decisions are made by vendors who often are leading on selection and outcomes rather than internal ownership.”
But this problem is far from just an FM problem. Operational technology (OT) systems have become a primary cyber threat target, and aging, unsupported BAS on a building network is a major exposure (we have many examples). The challenge is that the cybersecurity team that wants to mitigate this risk and the FM team that uses the system daily aren't collaborating in most organizations. One healthcare FM, when asked about his BAS upgrade plans, told us “the IT industry has become so difficult to work within, that we needed to take our own path in regard to IP communications.” Typical IT approaches to cybersecurity simply don't translate well to the world of OT devices. While both groups may want to renew the BAS, they struggle to get on the same page about how to do so.
Then, there are all the groups that rely on the BAS data and control as the foundation for other jobs to be done. An energy manager at a leading research university described their main blocker as, “silos across all of our OT systems and owners that don't allow us to find efficiency opportunities”. When an energy manager is pressed by rising utility costs and sustainability goals, their ability to find and deploy vast efficiency solutions is completely hamstrung by the lack of BAS data and control. We described this in our last NexusCast as the “energy management hierarchy of needs”.
Finally, all the stakeholders above may want an upgraded BAS, but they often don't control the budget to make one happen. The capital planning department listens to the plea for modern controls, then has to weigh that against the million other demands the organization is feeling, most of which are far more noticeable than the nearly invisible control system that sits above the ceiling tile and on the basement desktop. And if older buildings do get the nod for a BAS upgrade, it's often treated as incremental because of lack of budget and resources, which can leave you in a worse position. Our FM from the freeze stat story, who found his buildings in a state of half-migrated, told us, “the new construction demand we had this year made it impossible for us to migrate old controls entirely, so the migration just crept…. Looking back, we probably shouldn't have done it this way”.
What's described above is not too many cooks in the kitchen; it's a bunch of cooks not operating within the same kitchen.
👩🍳Cook #1 is the facility manager > responsible for the emergencies the BAS produces, but lacks budget and autonomy to make the system work effectively.
👩🍳Cook #2 is the cybersecurity lead > aware of the vulnerabilities that an end-of-life BAS imposes, but doesn't understand how the FM uses the tool and what their requirements are.
👩🍳Cook #3 is the energy manager > trying to eliminate mountains of energy waste, but the levers they can pull are disparate, tiny, and provide no insights.
👩🍳Cook #4 is the capital planner > aware of the plea for modernized controls, but hears it as only one demand across the masses, and the squeakiest wheel gets the grease.
The thesis of NexusCon 2026 is to solve problems by bringing the cooks into the same kitchen. Interdepartmental sessions allow all stakeholders to understand the problem from the perspective of their peers. The “BAS Reboot” session will do just this, bringing together facility managers, cybersecurity experts, energy managers, and capital planners into the same room to find harmonious approaches to solving the problem. It is one of 4 sessions we are specifically crafting to analyze the gaps between the departments that make Connected Buildings a reality.
Will you be there?
Are you tackling a BAS modernization project? Want help? We're happy to point you in the right direction. Our quick concierge form is the first step.
Sign up for the newsletter to get stories like this biweekly:
This is a great piece!
I agree.