This issue of Housing Technology has several articles and interviews on how technology is being used to improve fire safety.
While fire safety and its associated technologies have historically been more of an area for housing providers’ facilities managers than their IT staff, Housing Technology expects that IT departments will soon be more involved in supporting their respective organisations’ fire safety measures.
The aftermath of the Grenfell Tower disaster and the subsequent Hackitt report will rightly lead to greater scrutiny of housing providers and local authorities’ fire safety infrastructures.
The days of fire alarms and other associated safety devices being treated as standalone monitoring systems are over; the latest generation of alarms and devices are all IoT-enabled and as such will become another series of endpoints on housing providers’ IT infrastructures. This isn’t to suggest that housing providers’ IT teams will consequently become responsible for fire safety, but it is a good illustration of the increasing pervasiveness of IoT devices.
