Aquarion Water Customer Success Story

							Founded in 1857, the Aquarion Water Company of Connecticut is a public water supply
company for approximately 210,000 customer accounts or more than 700,000 people in
Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.             Aquarion Water, based in
Bridgeport, is the largest investor-owned water utility in New England and among the
ten largest in the U.S

Often considered mankind’s most vital resource, Aquarion has been committed to
providing the highest quality water to its customers for over 150 years. Like other
public utilities dedicated to maintaining a complex infrastructure to deliver public
service, the company has developed an increasing dependence on information
technology and computer enabled systems to manage water supply and provide back-
office automation. Additionally, water utilities have become increasingly subject to
public control and regulation ranging from local community groups to state-wide
government agencies and federal entities such as the Homeland Security Department.

In 2007, Aquarion implemented SAP and found it needed to significantly expand the IT
infrastructure to support SAP’s expanded business functionality. The company
recognized a need to develop a Disaster Recovery plan for SAP and the rest of the IT
infrastructure due to the inherent business risks in the event of a natural or manmade
disaster. Disaster Recovery plans to secure water assets and the systems that operate
the water system are a high priority for water utilities.

Aquarion engaged Hawthorne Associates to develop a comprehensive IT Disaster
Recovery plan for all its business systems including two major data centers, a complex
data network connecting multiple office locations and water treatment plants, and the
call center technology supporting the all-important customer service function.

Following its standard Disaster Recover methodology, Hawthorne Associates has
developed a tiered approach for Aquarion Water’s business recovery strategy based
upon each individual applications degree of business criticality. In a typical DR scenario,
the shorter the recovery time objective, the more costly and complex the solution is
likely to be. Therefore, individual applications and systems have been categorized and
tiered based upon individual business impact and criticality. This approach helps align a
baseline recovery target for each tier, with the goal of achieving business recovery
objectives at the lowest possible cost and complexity.
In the Aquarion Water design, mission critical applications, such as SAP, will be
recovered at an alternate data center facility within four hours from the time of the
disruption. Other critical applications including the telephony systems used to provide
customer service, the mobile infrastructure responsible for water meter reads, and
public safety utilities, such as “Call Before You Dig” will all be recovered within the same
timeframes. Applications of a slightly less vital nature will be recovered within a few
days with all systems fully restored within one week. The Disaster Recovery plan also
accounts for remote access connectivity for displaced employees and alternate site
provisions for other critical business functions.
The resulting solution satisfies Aquarion Water’s stated business requirements for
Disaster Recovery by enabling all business and mobile end-users access to the required
systems from remote locations in order to perform their critical business activities in the
event of a disaster.