The Quiet Dominoes: Preventing Cross-System Cascades in Commercial Buildings

Buildings are a web of interdependent systems: access control, HVAC, power distribution, elevators, WAN links and operational IT. In this episode Alex Morgan interviews Michael Harrington to unpack how seemingly minor failures turn into cascading outages that disrupt tenants, compromise security, and balloon repair costs. We diagnose common failure chains, highlight tradeoffs between redundancy and complexity, and walk through ownership, testing, and design choices that contain incidents before they escalate. Listeners will get concrete, vendor-neutral insights on mapping dependencies, prioritizing mitigations, structuring handoffs between IT and facilities, and running tabletop exercises that expose brittle interactions. The episode focuses on practical decisions property teams can make today to reduce single points of failure and shorten recovery time when things go wrong — without prescribing specific products or diving into low-level configuration.