A group of real estate technology experts—including Alex Stanton, Yardi industry principal for commercial—took stock of cloud computing’s growing role in real estate in a recent Realcomm-sponsored webinar, “The Latest Trends in the CRE Cloud.” With about 80% of companies running some portion of their workloads in public or private clouds, the panel explored the new opportunities this dynamic environment presents real estate companies as well as potential pitfalls. Emphasis on security Stanton focused on the challenge of safeguarding the massive amount of information involved in cloud-based commercial asset management. “Sources of real estate data are ever-expanding, and more public and private information is available as the Internet of Things takes hold,” he said.  Commercial real estate is now edging into the “Big Data” phase with transactional data being married with content including photos/videos, satellite imagery, weather data and building performance systems. While the collection points for this information can optimize business and site efficiency, they also present more potential points of entry for security threats. As a result, he said, “the bar is continuously being set higher for security.”  Yardi and other solution providers create vulnerability management protocols and multiple levels of data center and application security.  Real estate companies, meanwhile, must educate their employees on protecting the information they access with business applications on remote devices and other means. “We continue to see the acceleration of technology adoption in the commercial real estate space. It will be an exciting journey, but from a data governance standpoint we need to constantly adapt and identify the solutions that will connect them in an ever-evolving environment,” Stanton said. IT’s new perspective Another panelist was Bob Rybak, chief information officer for Morguard, whose portfolio includes 44 million square feet of commercial space and adopted 100% cloud...