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Mar 04 2019 
Smart Cities Are Most Vulnerable to Cyber Security Risks
With the urban civilization turning to smart technology solutions to increase operational efficiency and share information, cybersecurity has become a major concern. To keep pace with the tech-savvy generation, a need to establish a formal cybersecurity framework in smart cities has risen. To reduce the evident cyber risks, a cyber-resilient and trusted environment is a prerequisite.
The trade body FICCI in association with KPMG has suggested a five-point action plan to enable smart cities to make peace with the cybersecurity needs. “Smart Cities today is a model that has augmented civil infrastructure with a digital arm converting city assets into services with a view to improve urban living standards and reduce the environmental impact of growing populations,” the report explained.
Smart Infrastructure
The world is moving from traditional to smart infrastructure with connected homes and devices. “A formal guidance based on well-defined cybersecurity policy and a structured security organization with clearly defined roles and responsibilities will be important for governing the cybersecurity posture and reducing the cyber risks,” the report suggested.
Mr Ajay Pandey, Chair-FICCI Urban Infra & Smart Cities Committee, FICCI & Managing Director & CEO, Gift City, said that India is at the brink of next stage transformation and urban transformation is growing at a faster pace. He stressed upon the need to adopt strategies to merge infrastructure with the cultural values of the cities under the smart city development.
Data Security
Security of Data collected in huge Volumes, Variety and Velocity is imperative for confidence in the utilization of smart city services. Stakeholders and users in smart cities ecosystem will expect security to be built into the system; technology architects should follow an ‘always-on’ principle that provides high levels of control with appropriate fail-safes, the report defined.
Data is extremely valued in the smart city context. Highlighting its importance, Elias George, Chairman – Infrastructure, Government and Healthcare, KPMG in India stated, “India needs to be cognizant of the challenges that smart cities across the world have faced in terms of the deluge of cyber-attacks affecting the availability of smart city infrastructure, continuity of services and misuse of personal data.”
Collaborative Approach
Collaborative service utilization and management reduce ambiguity and accelerate the ability to implement secure products and services within a sustainable smart cities ecosystem. Engagement across industry, knowledge bodies and regulatory groups to standardise security measures can also help robust cybersecurity framework maintain independence despite collaboration.
A well-planned city requires the services to be monitored to ensure security, transparency and ability to react to known and unknown events. In short, services require checks and balances to ensure fair usage and product utilisation. Governance is the core of city management and is enabled further in a smart city through smarter solutions and aids to ensure smooth flow of processes.
The following infographic based on the FICCI-KPMG report would further elaborate on the concept of cybersecurity in smart cities.
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Mar 01 2019 
IoT Product Developers Need Freedom and Ecosystem Support
With product developers focusing more on IoT applications, the need for ecosystem support and professional tools to help them get their concepts to market is greater than ever.
Individual product developers and developer communities continue to be key drivers of IoT innovation, meaning large technology vendors leveraging these innovations into industry-transforming architectures need to maintain a delicate balance, allowing developers freedom to pursue their own paths, while providing them with tools to turn visions into reality.
“There is so much innovation coming from developer communities, but putting up a lot of corporate constructs around them would be constraining,” said Bob Merriman, director of strategic planning at Avnet. “Supporting them within the frame of an ecosystem is really important.”
The need for ecosystem support and professional tools to help product developers get their concepts to market is greater than ever, as suggested by the results of Avnet’s recent Product Developer Index survey, which collected the opinions of 1,190 of the combined 1.3 million members of the Hackster.io and Element14 developer communities.
Among those surveyed, 61 percent said IoT and sensors are the most important technologies they are currently working with, overshadowing in significance technology segments such as robotics and drones. Also, 26 percent of developers called IoT the most improved technology of 2018, giving IoT the edge even over the red-hot field of artificial intelligence, which finished second at 25 percent.
While even the most ardent IoT enthusiasts may be growing cautious about the notion of attaching sensors to anything and everything, Merriman said the survey results suggest sensor technology continues to be “one of the most underrated technologies in IoT.” “We’re not near the top of the mountain yet in terms of what can be done with them,” he said.
That potential has driven a boom in product developers starting up and targeting IoT in recent years, but it doesn’t take long for many of them to encounter the practical business and technology challenges that accompany their ambition.
Time and cost were mentioned by Avnet survey respondents as the biggest general challenges developers faced in moving from design phases to manufacturing. About 34 percent of developers surveyed said obtaining enough financing was a major challenge. Likely because of that more than 37 percent of survey respondents said they sought out partners to help them bring their products to market.
“They run into that age-old problem of startups — the ‘Death Valley Curve,’” Merriman said. “They sometimes don’t have enough money to fully realize their projects, but they can’t generate the revenue yet that could help them do that, and they’re stuck in between.”
That makes it especially important for Avnet and other large technology product firms to be ready to support developers from very early stages through later stages of getting to market, with tools such as design services, prototyping capabilities and product certification assistance. Some may even need help with technology selection, as 26 percent of those surveyed by Avnet said that identifying the best technology to use in their designs was a major challenge. At the latter end of the go-to-market spectrum, about 22 percent cited the ability to obtain product certification as a particular difficulty.
Aside from those business and operational concerns, security continues to be a major challenge for developers. Eighty-one percent of those surveyed said it is the biggest technological hurdle they face in IoT deployments.
On that issue, the results of Avnet’s survey echoed what similar studies have said. For example, an Evans Data survey from last summer found that more than two-thirds of developers working on IoT projects were addressing how to optimize security on their devices and applications. Their own pain may have caused them to prioritize security optimization, as 70 percent of the developers from that study indicated they already had been affected by a security breach.
It’s no surprise then to see companies like Avnet now adding more security support tools to their ecosystem offerings. At last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Avnet unveiled a developer starter kit for using Microsoft Azure Sphere to secure IoT devices and applications.
While IoT developers face many challenges even before they can put their products in front of customers, there are indications that with ecosystem support some things are getting easier. Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed by Avnet said the process of developing and testing prototypes has become a smoother one – 17 percent more said so last year. Developers also reported that other processes, such as identifying technology sources and scaling up production, also are on the upswing.
In many cases, such improvements would not have been realized without developers’ participation in strong ecosystems. “The ecosystem support is what separates the haves from the have-nots in this space,” Merriman said. “No one out there has everything they need to succeed all on their own.”
Source: https://www.iotworldtoday.com/2019/01/14/iot-product-developers-need-freedom-and-ecosystem-support/
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Mar 01 2019 
Trusted Platform Modules: 8 Surprises for IoT Security
Trusted Platform Modules are poorly understood by many, well understood by few.
Built into billions of devices, a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is usually a specialized chip on an endpoint’s motherboard that stores cryptographic keys on behalf of its host system for authentication and protection of the endpoint. Each TPM chip contains one or more unique key pairs, certified by the vendor, called endorsement keys (EKs), for validating the TPM’s authenticity. A TPM can also store platform “measurements” that identify software and firmware running on the platform. To stop the TPM from protecting the system, a hacker would have to interfere with it physically. In addition to their popularity on the PC and network side, TPMs will be architected into billions of Internet of Things devices.
Surprise 1: TPMs are passive, not active devices. They do not control anything on the host system they are embedded on.
A widespread misconception is that a trusted platform module somehow controls the system it’s a part of, but a TPM is 100 percent passive with respect to the rest of the system.
The trusted platform module is a self-contained component that has its own storage and processing capabilities, which it uses for protected operations on internal resources such as keys and measurements. These resources, however, are data that are given to the TPM, or that it is asked to generate.
Typically, boot code uses the TPM to store measurements of software running on the system, and applications use the TPM to protect the application’s keys and report measurements. These activities are all externally driven, not initiated by the TPM.
Surprise 2: A TPM is only useful when other things in the device take advantage of it.
The TPM is part of a broader security ecosystem that includes everything from the BIOS to motherboards to account passwords. To obtain value from the TPM, system designers must create systems that rely on the TPM’s internal resources. In traditional TPM implementations, software is “measured” before it is run in order to identify rogue software. The measurements are stored in the TPM, giving it second-hand awareness of “bad” software. The TPM will protect keys it holds, refusing access to rogue software that does not meet the expected measurements. For example, for solutions like Microsoft Bitlocker, an attacker booting to the wrong OS could not decrypt data on the hard drive. Similarly, a TPM might not allow a key to be used to authenticate a device to a bank, preventing an attacker from unauthorized account access.
With proper integration, a TPM can support the security of billions of future IoT devices that would otherwise be difficult to protect. By creating system dependencies on a TPM for devices like automotive electronic control units (ECU), system designers can make it much more difficult to swap out a system component without detection.
Surprise 3: A TPM doesn’t help much — if at all — with the heralded secure boot.
Secure boot is a hot topic. Upon startup, a device should run only the authorized code, not rogue software planted by a malicious actor. However, TPMs don’t provide secure boot. This occurs before the TPM comes into play. When a system powers on, early boot code (such as a UEFI BIOS) must decide which software will run next and which measurements are sent to the TPM. After the secure boot decisions are made, then the TPM can be used. The currently-running software can use the TPM to authenticate or decrypt the next piece of software before it loads, but this does not protect a system if an attacker can get at the early boot code.
The TPM can support a well-designed boot process (including “measured boot” or “trusted boot,” which we will discuss later), but the TPM has no impact on a secure boot.
Surprise 4: TPM has not been particularly successful considering how long it’s been available.
TPM has withstood significant scrutiny and is well established in the security community. Given TPM’s favorable reputation, its longevity (more than 20 years and counting) and the fact that TPMs have shipped in volume in PCs since 2005, it’s surprising how few people really know how to work with them. As a result — especially in the IoT realm — TPMs are not being tapped to their full potential. TPMs became a ubiquitous checkoff item on RFPs for PC-related projects and appear in billions of devices today, but most devices use TPMs minimally, or not at all.
The good news: TPM 2.0 is more flexible than the original TPM specification, allowing the newest TPMs to be applied to many embedded applications, including industrial sensors and smart home devices. Example: There is a TPM 2.0 profile for using TPM on limited-functionality ECUs for automotive applications. Now, designers and developers can more easily select granular TPM functions, whether for vehicles or a valve controller at a water utility.
Surprise 5: Leveraging TPMs is exceedingly difficult. They were not designed to be user-friendly… and they’re not.
It took the top companies in the PC industry — Compaq, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and others — years to build the ecosystem needed to make implementation of TPMs for PCs feasible. These companies carved out the TPM space, driving updates to hardware, firmware and software and defining new protocols. The expectation (or at least hope) was that with this infrastructure, TPM would become an effective enabler, acting like an interstate highway for security. That is, they would provide a smooth, straight, easy way to get to the destination. Unfortunately, TPM turned out to be so complicated that even with this rich ecosystem, almost nobody built solutions to leverage it.
Surprise 6: TPMs aren’t cheap.
Keep in mind, TPMs are hardware. Then, remember they’re not just hardware. Implementing a TPM solution also entails software, the device’s physical design, re-architecture of the system and modifications to integrate with the broader infrastructure. Adding a TPM could increase the cost of a device by fifty cents or more. For many embedded applications, that added cost is a dealbreaker. For devices already being re-architected or that have high security requirements, like those used to operate and secure industrial sites or critical infrastructure, the incremental cost is more likely to be justifiable.
Surprise 7: If a TPM is only used as a secure repository for encryption keys, money is probably being wasted.
Despite having a range of capabilities, TPMs are often used solely to protect symmetric or asymmetric keys, but simpler hardware or software-based designs can often do that job just as well as a TPM. If your platform already has a TPM, by all means, use it for key protection, but if you have a TPM, why not take advantage of the TPM’s more powerful features such as measurement-based access control and remote attestation?
Surprise 8: To retrofit an existing system, a hardware TPM is a non-starter.
Forget about it. Here’s why: the TPM must be architected into the overall system from the beginning. It’s not a last-minute add-on to plug in once a device has been produced. It’s hardware, and the platform must physically accommodate it. Moreover, the TPM must be fully integrated into the boot process and security functions of the platform.
Firmware or software-based TPMs offer alternatives. They are typically less secure than hardware-based TPM, but they can more easily be integrated into your design.
Source: https://www.iotworldtoday.com/2019/02/07/trusted-platform-modules-8-surprises-for-iot-security/
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Mar 01 2019 
Bosch: Why AI and IoT Demand a New Problem-Solving Approach
Bosch’s North American president sheds light on how artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things are changing how industrial companies innovate.
In the center of Bosch’s CES booth was the prototype of an autonomous electric shuttle with a slew of surprising features. Riders can open the door of the vehicle using a smartphone app known as Perfectly Keyless. Once in the vehicle, a passenger has access to a concierge service that can inform a passenger if, say, an upcoming flight has been canceled and which alternate flight they would prefer. The concept vehicle also was equipped with camera sensors that could detect if a rider is about to leave an object behind when exiting the shuttle. The same sensors can determine when the vehicle needs to have its interior cleaned.
Such experimental prototypes are important for an engineering-focused company like Bosch because of the feedback about the types of features the public, city officials and other demographic segments value. With the shuttle (pictured below), the company wanted to “paint the picture of what could be,” said Mike Mansuetti, president of Bosch North America, pictured above on the right. And from there, they can use feedback from such experiments to better understand what should be. Many AI- and IoT-enabled projects sound nice in the abstract, but can still fail to win the support of end users.
The emerging technologies such as AI and IoT offer “endless” possibilities, Mansuetti said
So it is important that engineers are working to help solve customers’ pain points rather than develop gee-whiz technology for its own sake. “We’re very focused on user experience,” Mansuetti said. In a Bosch context, that means both getting feedback from potential users about prototypes such as the e-shuttle, but also asking open-ended questions such as: “What is your biggest problem?”
When asking questions like that, the answers can be occasionally stupefying for the company’s engineers, Mansuetti said. For instance, city officials might say their municipality’s biggest challenge is crime, a high school dropout rate or high infant mortality, and then follow up with a question of their own: “How can you help us?”
But ultimately, such information can spur further brainstorming for the company’s engineers and executives, who can then investigate the role that, say, transportation might play in such matters. “It is just a mindset change in the organization,” Mansuetti said.
Technologies such as AI and IoT are helping drive closer collaborations across its four core divisions, which span mobility solutions, consumer goods, industrial technology and energy and building technology. “We are starting to see more of the work happening horizontally in the organization,” Mansuetti explained.
The prospect of autonomous shuttles becoming mainstream in the not-too-distant future led Bosch engineers to wonder how to handle potential problems that arise in such vehicles when no person is physically present to address them. “That’s where this idea around in-vehicle sensing came,” Mansuetti said. “When you think about transportation as a service now, or mobility as a service, what are all those things that could happen?” A passenger could leave a smartphone or wallet behind, step into a dirty vehicle or a physical confrontation could occur between two passengers in the vehicle. “When nobody’s there, then you just start thinking about these things.” And it is this thought process that led the company to develop prototype solutions for such challenges.
While the company is hoping to play a pivotal role in helping commercialize such autonomous vehicles, it will rely on partners to produce the end product. “The intent is really not to go into the shuttle business just like we would never probably enter into building a car,” Mansuetti said. “We are focused on electronics and technology: Why would we want to put the sheet metal together? That’s just not something that we want to do.”
In other words, that’s a problem the company has decided is not worth solving.
Source: https://www.iotworldtoday.com/2019/02/07/bosch-why-ai-and-iot-demand-a-new-problem-solving-approach/
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Mar 01 2019 
Ericsson reveals vision for next-gen cellular IoT solutions
Ericsson is empowering service providers across multiple industries to address a larger part of the IoT market with the help of its newly introduced next-generation cellular solutions.
These solutions will help proliferation of the cellular IoT evolution in what Ericsson sees as four market segments: broadband IoT, industrial automation IoT, massive IoT, and critical IoT.
Among those, industrial automation IoT and broadband IoT are two segments that are new; the former will allow advanced industrial automation applications with the most demanding connectivity requirements, whereas the latter adopts mobile broadband capabilities for IoT and supports higher data rates and lower latencies than massive IoT.
In accordance with its vision,
Ericsson is launching enhanced functionalities for massive IoT and new solutions for Broadband IoT. The 100km extension of NB-IoT cell range is one example of massive IoT enhancement, which results from stretching the standards-based limit from about 40km to 100 km via software updates without changing the existing NB-IoT devices. This benefits the rural and remote areas, especially for agriculture, logistics and environment monitoring. The company has deployed NB-IoT data connections up to 100km with Telstra and DISH.
Last month, Ericsson partnered with Deutsche Telekom to conduct a joint innovation project wherein it successfully demonstrated a millimetre wave link with data transmission rate of 40Gbps. The live trial, which was organised at the Deutsche Telekom Service Centre in Athens, is a breakthrough moment in the evolution from today’s 10Gbps reality toward the 100Gbps future. It was arranged over a hop distance of 1.4 kilometres in the millimetre wave (E-band) spectrum, which included a technical setup consisting Ericsson’s latest mobile transport technology including Ericsson’s MINI-LINK 6352 microwave solution and Router 6000.
In November, the Swedish telecom giant was selected by DISH for radio access and core network for its Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) network scheduled for March 2020. Ericsson leveraged its global wireless radio expertise to complete the initial radio frequency (RF) design for DISH’s nationwide NB-IoT network earlier in 2018.
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Mar 01 2019 
Study reveals laxness among automakers in terms of cybersecurity
An independent study conducted by Ponemon Institute found that 30% of the automotive companies do not have their own cybersecurity programme or a team. It also found that these companies do not even hire external organisations to secure the software used in their products.
Moreover, the survey shows that around 63% of all automotive firms are heedless when it comes to testing vulnerabilities. Less than half of software, hardware, and other technologies they develop remain untested.
Commissioned by Synopsys and SAE International, the study used a sampling frame of 15,900 IT security practitioners and engineers in the automotive sector, in which the final sample comprised of 593 surveys. In order to make sure that the responses provided are relevant, the Ponemon Institute chose only those respondents who were either involved in assessing or contributing to the security of automotive components in their organisation.
The Report
The report says: “The security professionals surveyed for our report indicated that the typical automotive organisation has only nine full-time employees in its product cybersecurity management program.” According to the report, 60% of all responders lack understanding and training on secure coding practices, which is the key reason behind all vulnerabilities in the automotive software, components and technology. Among the respondents, 50% said that the lack of quality assurance and testing procedures, 55% mentioned accidental coding errors, and 40% highlighted the use of insecure/outdated open source software components as the most common factors that lead to vulnerabilities in their technologies.
“Seventy-three percent of respondents surveyed in our report say they are very concerned about the cybersecurity posture of automotive technologies supplied by third parties. However, only 44% of respondents say their organisations impose cybersecurity requirements for products provided by upstream suppliers.”
Security vulnerabilities have been found most of the times as software has been added to vehicles. For instance: In April 2018, a Dutch cyber-security firm found that in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems used by some car models from the Volkswagen Group were vulnerable to remote hacking. And in October 2017, an electronics designer discovered a fault in the key fob system of several Subaru models. This security issue was refused by Subaru to patch when contacted and that could potentially be abused to hijack its customers’ cars.
Source: https://www.iottechnews.com/news/2019/feb/07/study-automakers-terms-cybersecurity/
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Şub 27 2019 
Researchers unveil Internet of Things security feature
‘Physically unclonable function’ is 10 times more reliable than previous methods
Rice University integrated circuit (IC) designers are at Silicon Valley’s premier chip-design conference to unveil technology that is 10 times more reliable than current methods of producing unclonable digital fingerprints for Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
Rice’s Kaiyuan Yang and Dai Li will present their physically unclonable function (PUF) technology today at the 2019 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), a prestigious scientific conference known informally as the “Chip Olympics.” PUF uses a microchip’s physical imperfections to produce unique security keys that can be used to authenticate devices linked to the Internet of Things.
Considering that some experts expect Earth to pass the threshold of 1 trillion internet-connected sensors within five years, there is growing pressure to improve the security of IoT devices.
Yang and Li’s PUF provides a leap in reliability by generating two unique fingerprints for each PUF. This “zero-overhead” method uses the same PUF components to make both keys and does not require extra area and latency because of an innovative design feature that also allows their PUF to be about 15 times more energy efficient than previously published versions.
“Basically each PUF unit can work in two modes,” said Yang, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. “In the first mode, it creates one fingerprint, and in the other mode it gives a second fingerprint. Each one is a unique identifier, and dual keys are much better for reliability. On the off chance the device fails in the first mode, it can use the second key. The probability that it will fail in both modes is extremely small.”
As a means of authentication, PUF fingerprints have several of the same advantages as human fingerprints, he said.
“First, they are unique,” Yang said. “You don’t have to worry about two people having the same fingerprint. Second, they are bonded to the individual. You cannot change your fingerprint or copy it to someone else’s finger. And finally, a fingerprint is unclonable. There’s no way to create a new person who has the same fingerprint as someone else.”
PUF-derived encryption keys are also unique, bonded and unclonable. To understand why, it helps to understand that each transistor on a computer chip is incredibly small. More than a billion of them can be crammed onto a chip half the size of a credit card. But for all their precision, microchips are not perfect. The difference between transistors can amount to a few more atoms in one or a few less in another, but those miniscule differences are enough to produce the electronic fingerprints used to make PUF keys.
For a 128-bit key, a PUF device would send request signals to an array of PUF cells comprising several hundred transistors, allocating a one or zero to each bit based on the responses from the PUF cells. Unlike a numeric key that’s stored in a traditional digital format, PUF keys are actively created each time they’re requested, and different keys can be used by activating a different set of transistors.
Adopting PUF would allow chipmakers to inexpensively and securely generate secret keys for encryption as a standard feature on next-generation computer chips for IoT devices like “smart home” thermostats, security cameras and lightbulbs.
Encrypted lightbulbs?
If that sounds like overkill, consider that unsecured IoT devices are what three young computer savants assembled by the hundreds of thousands to mount the October 2016 distributed denial-of-service attack that crippled the internet on the East Coast for most of a day.
“The general concept for IoT is to connect physical objects to the internet in order to integrate the physical and cyber worlds,” Yang said. “In most consumer IoT today, the concept isn’t fully realized because many of the devices are powered and almost all use existing IC feature sets that were developed for the mobile market.”
In contrast, the devices coming out of research labs like Yang’s are designed for IoT from the ground up. Measuring just a few millimeters in size, the latest IoT prototypes can pack a processor, flash memory, wireless transmitter, antenna, one or more sensors, batteries and more into an area the size of a grain of rice.
PUF is not a new idea for IoT security, but Yang and Li’s version of PUF is unique in terms of reliability, energy efficiency and the amount of area it would take to implement on a chip. For starters, Yang said the performance gains were measured in tests at military-grade temperatures ranging from 125 degrees Celsius to minus 55 degrees Celsius and when supply voltage dropped by up to 50 percent.
“If even one transistor behaves abnormally under varying environmental conditions, the device will produce the wrong key, and it will look like an inauthentic device,” Yang said. “For that reason, reliability, or stability, is the most important measure for PUF.”
Energy efficiency also is important for IoT, where devices can be expected to run for a decade on a single battery charge. In Yang and Li’s PUF, keys are created using a static voltage rather than by actively powering up the transistor. It’s counterintuitive that the static approach would be more energy efficient because it’s the equivalent of leaving the lights on 24/7 rather than flicking the switch to get a quick glance of the room.
“Normally, people have sleep mode activated, and when they want to create a key, they activate the transistor, switch it once and then put it to sleep again,” Yang said. “In our design, the PUF module is always on, but it takes very little power, even less than a conventional system in sleep mode.”
On-chip area — the amount of space and expense manufacturers would have to allocate to put the PUF device on a production chip — is the third metric where they outperform previously reported work. Their design occupied 2.37 square micrometers to generate one bit on prototypes produced using 65-nanometer complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology.
The research was funded by Rice University.
Source: http://news.rice.edu/2019/02/20/rice-u-researchers-unveil-internet-of-things-security-feature/
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Ara 27 2017 
Digitalisation could pay off in health and sustainability
The tide of digitisation in the workplace cannot be stopped, but we can harness it to improve the health of workers and overall sustainability, writes JLL’s Susan Sutherland.
With technology permeating everything that we do, it’s led to significant transformation in the workplace—specifically, how, where (and who) is working and what work employees do. The speed of change and disruption across industries has also caused greater uncertainty as many businesses rethink the way they harness their talent and real estate.
Digitalisation
For one, automation and artificial intelligence will change many job functions and render others irrelevant across different industries—particularly jobs and tasks that are manual or process driven. JLL research has found that as a result, the future workforce will be divided into three segments: core employees, freelancers and consultants, and jobs that are automated.
Core employees will be concentrated in smaller and fewer locations, ideally in central business districts with transportation and amenities concentrated nearby—reducing their energy and resource usage. This smaller core workforce could mean smaller office footprints requiring less energy from power and less waste generated.
In parallel, the emergence of the ‘liquid workforce’—freelancers, consultants and more—means potentially less commuting and perhaps a cleaner way of working. The need for flexibility to accommodate the uncertain operating environment and more project-based work could require more modular fit-outs and by extension, possibly less materials and waste in the building process.
Work can become healthier and more sustainable with the progress of digitisation. Image: Betta Living, CC BY-NC 2.0
Sustainability and smart buildings
We’ve already seen how many forward-thinking organisations have already adopted more efficient real estate management in the form of smart buildings and smart offices.
This is essentially powered by the Internet of Things to drive efficiency and real-time optimisation of building operations such as automatic monitoring and optimisation of air conditioning—of particular interest in Asia, where indoor as well as outdoor air quality is a perennial issue.
Healthy workplaces that make people feel good can help prevent attrition rates in a labour market where companies are battling to retain staff.
Some features of smart buildings and workplaces also herald a shift to a less paper-based workplace—from centralised ‘follow me’ printing (which means print jobs are sent to a centralised system and only released to their users upon activation for less wastage) to less storage in hot desk environments.
Companies are also embracing a more holistic view of sustainability. They’re thinking about more than cost-savings or maximising spaces to creating healthy, fulfilling, and productive environments for employees.We now speak about healthy buildings instead of simply sustainable ones. In fact, the World Green Building Council now promotes the concept of healthy green buildings—buildings that are environmentally sensitive but also provide for the well-being of staff.
Recent JLL research on human experience reveals that sustainability and health are important to employees, and wellness facilities are rated as the workplace amenity most likely to drive higher workplace engagement.
For instance, biophilic design or buildings with more access to nature and greenery makes a significant difference to workers. A JLL survey done in conjunction with Tedx Sydney last year found that over 90 per cent of those surveyed felt more productive and creative with access to fresh air, indoor light and air quality and healthy food, fitness centres, and even mental health services.
Healthy workplaces that make people feel good can help prevent attrition rates in a labour market where companies are battling to retain staff.
Authorities and organisations are beginning to take this seriously. The Building and Construction Authority in Singapore, for one, has announced plans to work together with the Health Promotion Board to roll out a new Green Mark scheme in mid-2018 that aims to improve the health of occupants through office interior and wellness programmes.
Amid the changes to workspaces and work practices, a side benefit that comes up is these could ensure employees have both more time and access to other pursuits that boosts creativity, innovation and ensure a healthy balance in their life.
The drive towards a digitised workplaces and improved employee experience could just lead us to a healthier happier lives and a more sustainable future in real estate.Susan Sutherland is the Head of APAC Corporate Research for JLL in Singapore. This article was written exclusively for Eco-Business.
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Ara 12 2017 
Boston Consulting selected for Turkey’s domestic car project
Tuncay Özilhan, the chairman of the board of Anandolu Group, one of the members of the five-company joint venture to produce Turkey’s domestic automobile, has said Boston Consulting has been selected as an international consulting company for the project, explaining the consulting company will work on the project’s feasibility.
Prefacing that the domestic car will be a buyable product, Özilhan said: “The most expensive component of the automobile is the battery, which sees very quick developments, hence getting cheaper.” He explained that the gearbox and electric motor are not sophisticated and that the software is the complicated part to manufacture, as it requires a more refined job. Therefore, he said the cost of the automobile will decrease. “If you ask buyers to pay higher prices, you cannot guarantee demand in the product.”
As for the reasons why Anadolu Group participated in the project, Özilhan cited his belief in the feasibility of the automobile.
Özilhan also said: “The idea of being part of a national project and the development of new electric cars incited me.” He added that Turkey holds an advantageous position with this initiative and that it is not too late. “For instance, Anadolu Isuzu is working on an electric bus project, as electric buses undergo a terrific transformation across the world.”
Last month, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced Thursday the names of five companies – Anadolu Group, BMC, Kıraça Holding, Turkcell and Zorlu Holding – that will take part in the consortium to make Turkey’s first domestically produced car.