The Building That Runs the Cloud
The Controls Outside the Firewall
The easiest way in may be through the room around the server.
INDEPENDENT EVIDENCE
In 2026, researchers at TrendAI asked a simple question. How many industrial and building control devices can anyone on the internet reach, right next to America's data centers?
They looked within one kilometer of 1,063 U.S. data centers. After five rounds of filtering, they found about 6,300 devices they rated high-confidence. Building automation controllers. Heating and cooling systems. Power management screens. All answering on the public internet.5
The mix tells the story. BACnet devices, the language of heating, cooling, lighting, access and fire systems, made up 58 percent. Niagara building platforms made up another 23 percent. The list also included equipment built specifically for data center power and cooling.
The researchers also found 548 of the exposed building devices were running products past end of life. No more security fixes are coming for them, ever.6
One more surprise. Data centers permitted in 2021 or later showed more nearby exposure than older ones, about 13 percent versus 5 percent. The researchers didn't say why. But the trend points the wrong way.
What this research does not prove
We want to be careful here, because the researchers were.
It does not prove every device belonged to a data center. Location by internet address is rough, and some devices may sit in a neighbor's office building. It does not show that any data center was attacked.
What it does show is a pattern. A lot of controls for cooling, power and building systems are reachable from anywhere, in exactly the places where uptime matters most. And since the study left out smaller private facilities, the researchers called their count a floor.
Why it matters to you
An exposed port is a technical detail. An exposed path to the system that keeps your server hall cool is a business risk.
Ask both questions: "Is this device on the internet?" and "If someone reached it, what could they change, and what would stop working?"
You can only answer that if you can see the device, its connections, and what depends on it.