Industry: Utilities – Water & Wastewater
Project Overview:
To enhance Sydney Water’s perimeter and internal defences, Sydco implemented next-generation firewalls across its OT network. The objective was to control traffic, enforce security policies, and detect malicious activity without disrupting critical operations.
Challenges:
- Existing firewalls lacked application aware visibility.
- There was no centralized management of firewall rules across distributed sites.
- Operational teams were concerned about potential disruptions to real-time control systems.
Solution:
Sydco deployed next-generation firewalls capable of deep packet inspection. Rule sets were customized for each zone, and a centralized management platform was introduced to streamline policy updates and monitoring. All changes were coordinated with OT operations to ensure zero downtime.
Results:
- Unauthorized traffic was effectively blocked at key network boundaries.
- OT and IT teams collaborated more closely through shared visibility and governance.
- The firewall infrastructure became a critical layer in Sydney Water’s defense-in-depth strategy.
