Building services company ARE expands its service business with the help of Tosibox

ARE is a Finnish family-owned company with over a hundred years of experience in building services engineering. As Finland’s largest building services company, it places particular emphasis on smart building technology. It provides solutions and services for the entire lifecycle of various properties (such as offices, hotels, hospitals, or industrial plants), ranging from building services engineering contracts to maintenance and repair, modernization, and renovation. ARE is part of the Conficap Group.

Secure Remote Connections

ARE is one of Tosibox's longest-standing customers. The collaboration began in 2013 when ARE started its remote monitoring service, and there was a need for a secure remote connection suitable for building automation systems. The focus was on how to build remote connections in the most secure way possible without compromising the building automation system. A few people at ARE had already familiarized themselves with Tosibox's solution, and soon the first presentation was arranged.

The deployment of Tosibox was first initiated extensively for remote monitoring of properties. Before that, individual users in ARE already used Tosibox for building automation programming via remote connection. Nowadays, the Tosibox connection enables ARE to have a secure remote connection to the properties, which allows remote management, lighting programming, building automation renovations, warranty work, and emergency solutions such as property maintenance, cooling, and UPS to be performed remotely.

Emergency solutions bring savings both to the end-customer and the environment, as the property maintenance may not necessarily have to travel to the location, which may be hundreds of kilometers away. The ability to work remotely with secure network connections speeds up problem-solving, which has a significant impact on preventing energy loss and, thus also on energy savings. ARE case study_etävalvonta LI

"In Finland, Tosibox is a well-known and trusted brand in the building automation industry. When considering information security in buildings, Tosibox has undoubtedly become the industry standard. I can honestly say that in any building where Tosibox has been installed, we have not had any information security issues. ARE never takes any insecure connections, and it will be built if it is not available We have also never experienced any availability issues, which is an excellent thing today." says Juha Sahlsten from ARE.

Easy and up-to-date management of connections and users is a high priority for ARE because of the variety of users. The network users vary from the employees of the properties to several partners, ARE experts, and installers, among others. In addition, the need to use the connection varies greatly between permanent and temporary (e.g., energy audits) access rights. Therefore, the management of the Tosibox network is tightly integrated into ARE's information security and access control.

"The additional strengths of Tosibox, in addition to its high information security, are extremely easy implementation and management. In addition, its use from the end-user perspective is very simple, even though end-users often do not have extensive IT skills," Sahlsten continues.

The Future of Developing Service Business

By the end of 2022, ARE switched from the physical Central Lock management system to the virtualized HUB within Tosibox Platform. In addition to providing a more modern management system, HUB offers new features that can be used in ARE's future service business.

ARE is also contributing to developing Tosibox's operations and is involved in the beta testing phase of the new Tosicontrol user interface, which will be released for public use in Q2/2023. The new, more modern interface improves, among other things, the management of Tosibox Key users.

Benefits achieved
• Over 300 cyber-secure connections.
• Secure remote control and maintenance of properties.
• Cybersecure connections to and from buildings.
• User-friendly solution (also for end-users of the network)

“In Finland, Tosibox is a well-known and trusted brand in the building automation industry. Tosibox has undoubtedly become the industry standard when considering information security in buildings. I can honestly say that in any building where Tosibox has been installed, we have not had any information security issues.”
The Senior Service Manager, ARE.