S for Security: Securing the future of the UK’s water utilities and our water
Written by Ritesh Shrivastava on 25/10/2024
In 1995, the then-vice-president of the World Bank, Ismail Serageldin, warned: “Many of the wars in this century were about oil, but wars of the next century will be over water.” At the time, it seemed a little alarmist. But a quarter of the way into this century, it seems prescient. How can Fujitsu partner with water utilities now to ensure the UK’s water security, protect our water resources and increase our water resilience?
A war we can win
What Serageldin called ‘wars’ may have turned out to be more ambiguous and more insidious than he might have imagined. But his words are no less true. Enemies range from climate change to bad agents. Battlegrounds range from dry riverbeds to remote water purification plants to legacy networks. The good news is that with accelerating energy digitalisation, Fujitsu believes this is a war we can win – for the good of not only water utilities, but those they serve and the natural ecosystem their business model relies on.
Time to transform
2025 is a watershed year for water utilities.
While they’ve tackled so many challenges, they’ve found themselves caught in a relentless cycle. Many have failed to meet all their safety, customer and environment KPIs. Many been punished by crippling fines. Most have faced – or fear - increasing cyber risks. Almost all are finding their business models are proving unsustainable. And we’re all confronting the stark realisation that water provision in the UK is not enough to see us into the future. In fact, by 2050 we’re going to need almost 5 billion litres a day more water than we’re using now. 1
So, water utilities must either transform to deliver water security for the UK’s future - or risk organizational failure, intervention by government, and water shortages. Worse, water scarcity.
Tough times, transformative partnerships
Of course, transformation is tough for every industry. But for our water utilities, it’s made tougher by the need to drive change securely, and protect continuity, at the same time.
And this, in the face of floods, droughts, pollution, leakage – and a rising tide of cyber threats. It’s little surprise that the UK water industry is among the top 3 sectors most vulnerable to cybercrime.2
Water and wastewater utilities are more vulnerable to cyberthreats because of the convergence of complex supply chains, vendor ecosystems, the integration of IT and ICS/OT systems and the roll-out of digital smart meters. Among critical components, life and pump stations and treatment facilities have the largest potential digital attack surface. The most pervasive of cyber security threats include:
- Exploitation of remote access technologies;
- Vulnerable ICS/OT controllers;
- Adversaries accessing the ICS/OT environment through exposed assets;
- Attacks on the IT environment followed by capitalising on poor network segmentation; and
- Lack of multifactor authentification.
Tough times, however, often forge transformative partnerships, capable of delivering ingenious solutions. At Fujitsu UK, we believe we have just such an approach to partnership.
Secure, scale and sustain
Fujitsu has been trusted as the digital transformation partner to critical national infrastructure in the UK across diverse sectors.
Now we’re working on designing, developing and deploying state-of-the-art technology-enabled solutions that can help water utilities do the three things that are the most critical to not only their future, but the UK’s: ‘Secure, scale and sustain’.
Security by design
The first priority of every water utility must be water security. From cybersecurity to digital twinning to process automation, Fujitsu can use water and water treatment technologies to give your organisation the protection you need from the ever-increasing, and increasingly sophisticated, threats and risks to your utility network, your infrastructure, your water supply and your business model.
Virtual edge, virtual defence
The first critical step in securing water utilities against hacktivists is rapidly deploying IT/OT/IoT security across water and wastewater processing sites, especially new ones in development.
For example, Fujitsu’s market-leading comprehensive security and operational solution, Virtual Edge, enables the rapid deployment of new sites, locations and services in minutes rather than weeks – increasing organizational agility.
Our Virtual Edge solution has already been piloted with a top 10 water utility and proven to provide:
- Comprehensive security: It integrates firewalls, intrusion prevention and detection software to create a protective barrier around water utilities’ OT digital ecosystem. This safeguards against cyber risks associated with the shift from traditional to internet-based connectivity. The result? It limits the impact of incidents, ensuring uninterrupted operations and reducing downtime.
- Regulatory compliance: It offers 24/7 proactive monitoring and detection for water utilities, following service operating procedures, including anomaly detection, traffic monitoring, secure remote access and control.
- Data-driven operations: It provides employees with secure remote access and management of equipment like pumps, SCADA systems, PLCs and network devices. This means reduced risk yet fewer on-site visits, reduced reliance on specialized skills in different regions, lower exposure to hazardous environments, decreased energy consumption and optimized equipment continuous performance end-to-end through the system.
Smart water tech, smart security
Fujitsu also has other solutions which can help lock-in security and lock-out bad agents. Take, for example, our ServiceNow offering, which enables the generation, collection and prioritization of alerts. With water utilities facing upwards of 3 million alerts per year, ServiceNow enables the most critical alerts to be prioritised and acted on faster and more appropriately, saving on operational costs and reducing the occurrence of fineable incidents.
Or there’s our Digital Twin Technology. By creating a digital twin of critical assets, it enables engineers to monitor and control them without risk, analyse real-time data in operation, carry out predictive maintenance securely and optimize processes for reliable continuity.
Protecting future growth
The convergence of proven and new technologies promises to not only strengthen our water utilities’ defences, but also set the stage for future innovation and growth.
That’s why our partnership model goes beyond just delivering standard technology solutions. We engage in joint innovation with our water utility customers, ensuring that the solutions we develop are precisely tailored to their unique challenges. And we also cross-leverage the advanced technologies and strategies developed for other critical national infrastructure organisations, applying those insights to the water industry.
This approach positions us uniquely and allows us to provide secure, robust and flexible solutions that not only address today’s issues, but also anticipate future challenges as the organisation grows.
After all, our priority in partnership is to deliver the level of security our water utility customers need in order to rebuild trust in the relationships they value most. Of course, that’s with their customers, as a priority, but also with regulators, policy makers and the media.
[1] National Drought Group, Environment Agency, 16th October 2024
[2] According to 2024 Threat Intelligence Index by IBM Security
Written by
Ritesh Shrivastava
Head of Water Utilities
