Water utility strengthens DR and cybersecurity posture —recovering data 7-8 times faster than before

The delivery of safe drinking water can’t stop during disasters. That makes business continuity a top priority for Publiacqua, which provides drinking water for 1.3 million people in Italy’s Tuscany region. To strengthen disaster recovery and cyber resilience, the utility uses a Cohesity solution to back up physical, virtual, and cloud workloads in one facility and replicate to another. After a cybersecurity assessment, Publiacqua also started backing up the most critical data in Cohesity FortKnox, a Cohesity-managed cloud vault.

The Challenge

Water utilities are considered critical infrastructure, making disaster recovery and cyber resilience top priorities. Italy’s Publiacqua previously backed up VMs, databases, and files on tape. But restoring even one VM from tape can take hours—and Publiacqua has 270 VMs amounting to 329 TB. Hours-long delays in recovering destroyed or encrypted VMs can disrupt water capture, treatment, conveyance, and distribution. “We needed a modern data protection solution to quickly restore operations after a disaster or cyberattack,” says Paolo Vinci, Publiacqua’s CIO. “Strong data security is important because we handle personal data and are subject to the General Data Protection Regulation.”

The Solution

Working with TAI Solutions, an IT services provider, Publiacqua conducted proofs of concept (PoCs) with leading data protection solutions. Cohesity led the field. “The PoC demonstrated that Cohesity is reliable and easy to use, lowering operational costs,” says Alessandro Neri, Architecture Manager for the utility. “We also like built-in Cohesity security features, including immutable backups, multifactor authentication, role-based access controls, and a quorum requirement to change settings.” 

Today Publiacqua uses a Cohesity solution to protect on-premises workloads (physical and virtual) as well as VMware Cloud workloads running in AWS. All data is backed up to an on-prem Cohesity cluster and replicated to a Cohesity cluster in another facility. Either site can take over the other’s workloads during a disaster.

After a cybersecurity assessment by global consulting firm EY in 2023, Publiacqua added another immutable copy of the most critical data on Cohesity FortKnox, a Cohesity-managed isolated cloud vault. “Our cybersecurity consultant recommended we use a secure cloud vaulting solution to enhance data protection and disaster recovery,” Neri says. “FortKnox gives us added confidence that we can restore clean data after a cyberattack.”

The Results

The Cohesity solution is helping Publiacqua achieve its goals for stronger disaster recovery, cyber resilience, and lower operational costs. “If an on-prem or cloud server is lost, damaged, or encrypted, we can recover 7-8 times faster with Cohesity than our previous data protection solution,” says Neri. “That’s because we can instantly restore hundreds of files, objects, and VMs at once and recover individual files or folders instead of waiting to restore the entire VM. We also have the flexibility to recover files from any location to any location, and to create instant clones for test and development.”

Storing a separate immutable backup in an isolated cloud vault strengthens cyber resilience for Publiacqua. “Cohesity FortKnox gives us peace of mind,” says Neri. “We hope we never will need to use it, but it’s reassuring to know we can.” 

Finally, operational costs have dropped because of the simple Cohesity management interface. “We save 25–30 hours per week with Cohesity because it automates workflows like VMware VM backup and recovery orchestration” says Alessandro Neri. With the previous backup solution we needed specialist support at least twice a week to control the backup windows and to verify the backup results.

With the use of Cohesity instead, after an initial set-up phase together with specialist support, the platform itself schedules the various backup jobs that any technician in our operational structure is able to quickly check only in the event of problems reported in the summary reports.

Now Publiacqua is preparing to adopt Cohesity DataHawk, the AI-powered tool for threat hunting in backups. Also in the works is Cohesity Cloud Edition, which offers capacity-based pricing that the utility expects to further reduce costs. 

Key Benefits:

• 7-8x faster disaster recovery 
• 50% lower management costs 
• 30% lower capacity requirements with deduplication and compression 

About Publiacqua SpA

Publiacqua SpA is an Italian utility that provides integrated water services for four Tuscany provinces with 1.3M residents. In addition to distributing drinking water, the company manages wastewater collection and purification, helping to reduce pollution in the region’s rivers.