A secure path from building to cloud with SCION

Alexis Leibbrandt

In the classic X-Files episode "Ghost in the Machine," a high-tech corporate headquarters turns into a vertical death trap. The culprit is a centralized AI that overrides its own safety protocols. Weaponizing elevators, vents, and defense grids to stop humans from flipping the kill switch.

A building with a literal survival instinct belongs in the early 1990s. But the underlying cyber-flaw is real. Traditional Building Management Systems (BMS) are monolithic and deeply interconnected. If a bad actor breaches a single vulnerable node, they inherit the keys to your entire physical kingdom, from HVAC loops to security doors.

How do you get the efficiency gains of a data-driven building without engineering a sci-fi nightmare?

You dump legacy networking for true zero-trust architecture. By routing your BMS data through the SCION network straight into the akenza platform, you combine verified, path-aware connectivity with strict cloud isolation. The result is a highly responsive smart building whose data is much harder to intercept or redirect.

Do you know where your building data travels?

BMS data used to stay inside the building. Now it goes to the cloud for energy reporting, occupancy analytics and AI tools, and every new connection is one more way in. In a 2025 study by Claroty of nearly 500'000 building management systems, 75% of organizations had BMS devices with known exploited vulnerabilities, many of them insecurely connected to the internet.

If you connect your BMS to the cloud, chances are its data travels over the public internet. A firewall protects the building network and the connection is encrypted, but once the data leaves the building, standard IP routing decides which networks it crosses on the way.

The sender has no say in that route and no way to check it. For a security team, that's a blind spot. This is where SCION and akenza come in.

SCION: the sender picks the path

SCION is an internet architecture developed at ETH Zürich. With SCION, the sender chooses the network path its data takes and can verify it.

Every path segment is cryptographically signed, so traffic can't be redirected without anyone noticing. Networks are grouped into isolation domains, such as a country or a sector, each with its own roots of trust.

SCION runs alongside the existing internet, and the Swiss financial sector already relies on it. The Secure Swiss Finance Network (SSFN), run by SIX and the Swiss National Bank, is built on SCION.

From BMS to the cloud with akenza and SCION

We recently connected a building of a large Swiss financial institution to the akenza platform over SCION.

On site, the akenza Building Edge runs on a Tridium JACE 9000 controller linked to the building's BMS. From there, data travels to the akenza platform over a multipath SCION connection. On top of it, the route to the cloud is now chosen and verified.

What it means for real estate portfolios

The setup rolls out building by building. Each site gets a Building Edge and a SCION connection, and the existing building systems stay in place.

Once the data reaches akenza, it feeds several use cases, e.g. energy metering, indoor air quality, occupancy. It also opens the way for AI applications that analyze BMS data and propose improvements to live building operation, such as HVAC optimization. The closer a tool gets to the systems that run a building, the more the path to those systems matters.

That makes SCION a fit for organisations with high security requirements, such as banks, insurers, critical infrastructure operators and public authorities. Note that since April 2025, critical infrastructure operators in Switzerland must report cyberattacks to the National Cyber Security Centre within 24 hours.