An Enterprise IoT Platform for SA Water

SA Water delivers essential water and wastewater services to more than 1.8 million South Australians.

SA Water’s sustainable infrastructure strategy utilises advances in technologies to help improve cost effectiveness in maintaining their water and wastewater assets and improving customer outcomes through reduced supply interruptions. Since 2016, this strategy has been effectively delivering these outcomes by gaining deeper insights into physical assets using IoT technologies, enabling more informed decisions and a shift toward preventative maintenance.

The next phase of IoT investment for SA Water involves leveraging the latest IoT technologies. However, the organisation faced the challenge of managing their existing aging IoT devices without increasing operational demand.

Solution

Faced with tight deadlines for upgrading legacy IoT capabilities and deploying new ones, SA Water needed a pragmatic solution. Choosing to balance the progression of new projects with the transition to a new, more modular, and supportable IoT platform, capitalising on recent IoT advancements Chamonix experts collaborated with the Product Owner and key stakeholders from SA Water’s business and technology teams, reaching a consensus to re-architect the existing environment in stages. This strategy allowed new IoT projects to move forward while designing and implementing the rest of the new Enterprise IoT Platform.

The Enterprise IoT Platform adopted common communication methods, centralised IoT telemetry ingestion and storage, and simplified support and administration functions. Crucially, it aligned with industrial IoT (IIoT) technologies and patterns, preparing for any future integration of industrial IT-OT event-centric architectures or solutions.

Business Benefits

By aligning all IoT solutions with the new Enterprise IoT platform, SA Water developed additional functionalities usable across all IoT devices, such as device health and management tools, resulting in:

• Accelerated deployment: the new enterprise IoT Platform enables faster and more consistent deployment by leveraging the ability to re-use shared capabilities.
• Enhanced data sharing: centralised ingestion and storage of IoT telemetry data promote easier data sharing across teams, empowering data scientists to extract deeper insights for informed capital planning and maintenance activities.
• Simplified architecture: reduces the complexity and effort to support the IoT landscape, consequently reducing the operational costs.

Solutions & Services

The solution leveraged a range of Azure services including;

• Azure Storage Accounts
• Azure Functions
• Azure Logic Apps
• Azure Service Bus
• Azure IoT Hub

Additionally, it adhered to the SA Government’s Conditions of Connection criteria and followed the Water Services Associate of Australia IoT Guidelines.