Patch or Preserve: Managing Firmware, Configuration Drift, and Updates in Building Systems

Firmware updates and configuration changes are routine in IT — but in buildings they can cascade into locked doors, failed HVAC schedules, or tenant downtime. In this episode Alex Morgan interviews Michael Harrington to unpack how configuration drift and unmanaged firmware changes create brittle building operations, why patching policies that work for servers often fail for low-voltage and OT devices, and what practical guardrails property teams can deploy without becoming DevOps experts. We cover common causes (mixed vendor stacks, unclear ownership, and parallel trade activities), tradeoffs between security and uptime, test-and-rollback patterns, and simple governance: change windows, immutable baselines, firmware inventories, and tabletop validation. Michael brings real operational examples and capital planning perspectives so listeners can prioritize controls that reduce outages, limit vendor lock, and keep tenants running. By the end you'll have a compact checklist to reduce surprise failures and a sensible path to bring updates under control without disrupting operations.