Top CRE executives discuss the state of cyber security in the industry.

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John Gilbert, EVP, COO, CTO, Rudin Management

Cyber security is keeping the bad guys out, and still allowing your company to function, morph, and grow in terms of the digital tools that they have at their disposal.

Kent Tarrach, VP, Asset Management & Global Corporate Development, Brookfield

From my experience with it to date, it's both hardening of the systems that we have in place to manage our critical systems: your elevators, your HVAC, your fire and life safety, and your other building management systems that could potentially be attacked from an outside party in some fashion. And so, that we've spent a little more time on because we've recognized that that is an issue for some time and so there's been some cases in the news where there's been recognition that these assets in these systems need to be hardened against outside attack.

Raj Bhatti, CIO, NGKF

If you view a property as being digital all of the concerns that you would have maybe for a data center become relevant. And just emotionally, if you said this was a data center versus a commercial property of a Fortune 50 firm, you know, you would typically these days get a different reaction. It's the office of X Y Z or versus this is the data center of X Y Z and your non-technical reaction to one versus the other as to what the cyber security requirements are would be very different.

Hussain Ali-Khan, Global Alliance Director, CBRE

I think that it's a well-known story that Target lost a ton of data and personal information as a result of a hack through a HVAC port. And I think the the challenge then for corporate real estate operators is to avoid creating those risk points. Now I know that all corporations have their own cyber security teams and their network engineering teams who are super sensitive to that stuff. Right. In fact, when I was at The Times we built two separate networks one for the building and one for the business, and the two did not connect, but the the point was is that:

(1) We didn't one building data mucking up the business data when they were sending enormous files of images and data and video right to

(2) We didn't want the building system to create a vulnerability for the business

Raj Bhatti, CIO, NGKF

Physical security to the premises, access to the network, all of the best practices that are relevant for the data center need now be relevant for that same property that ten years ago was not a data center and now it's a data center. Through that property you can access everything behind every firewall, at least physically, so whatever controls whatever frameworks whatever best practices you have for your data center need to be in your and your building as well.

John Gilbert, EVP, COO, CTO, Rudin Management

Cyber security is really really important. You know we know that there are efforts on a daily, monthly, minute by minute basis of bad guys trying to do bad things to existing networks. And we've got to do everything we possibly can to prevent that from happening. And there's a lot of tools that require…

And I think from a startup standpoint, if there's startups watching this video, you need to have SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3 certification. You need ultimately to have messaging within your product in terms of of how you are cyber secure and that if a particular owner or large tenant is going to use their product that that you're on it…

Hussain Ali-Khan, Global Alliance Director, CBRE

There's tons of really great TV shows like Person of Interest and The Matrix and things like that that show the possibilities of how building information management systems, BIM systems, or other types of data could potentially be used beyond their intended use… And almost every contract that I'm engaged in or involved in has some sort of cyber security clause to it. It requires us to attest to cyber security related activities like data breaches and stuff like that. So I don't think it’s as far out as those people think it is. I think it's a pretty common BAU activity.

Kent Tarrach, VP, Asset Management & Global Corporate Development, Brookfield

Cyber security is a newer trend and newer topic that again we're trying to wrap our heads around…

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