| |DECEMBER 20208Expert OpinionA vailability and quality of water is a critical factor for the sustainabili-ty and resilience of any city. Typi-cal problems in any water utility today are aging infrastructure, tight budgets as most of them are funded by taxpayers and a visible lack of real time responsiveness. These factors result in water wast-age through absence of timely leak detection, overflow in water catchment, and inadequate waste-water management. Investments to the tune of billions of dollars per year are turned ineffective and result in higher water bills for the consumers. Hence, it is im-perative that water utilities (being an asset intensive industry) look for affordable, easy to implement OpeX based solutions with a vi-sion to transform themselves into Digital Utilities.Advent of Integrated Service Delivery Platforms (ISDPs) for Digital UtilitiesWater utilities are now rapidly adopting affordable IoT solutions which use low cost sensors with a cloud-based backend in an "as a service" model. With public cloud based IoT platforms, CapEx is minimized compared to tradition-al telemetry mechanisms. Also, customers can build bespoke prod-ucts leveraging the public cloud based IoT environments rather than opting for standalone third party products.These public cloud providers offer most of the building blocks such as edge gateways, IoT hubs for data acquisition & aggrega-tion, low cost data storage, secure infrastructure including device authentication and authoriza-tion, along with IoT analytics to provide useful dashboards and insights. It is easy to build a com-pletely unified system leverag-ing the cloud native services and aforementioned subsystems.With the advent of multiple connectivity technologies like Wi-Fi 6, Lora WAN & 5G, it is easier to connect devices to the cloud. But the key challenge which remains is to IoT-enable the legacy devices and build an integrated manage-ment system where both IoT and existing SCADA based monitoring systems can coexist and provide an integrated service delivery platform. The integrated system should help in effective collection, management and intelligent use of water data; responding to cur-rent public & political scrutiny and to enable the facilitation of government reforms; reimagin-ing processes and enabling auto-mation wherever appropriate; and transitioning existing legacy sys-tems, that are at risk of failure and loss of data integrity, to systems that are resilient and meet modern standards aligned to operating models of today's water utilities. Recommended approach towards designing and building Integrated Service Delivery Platform (ISDP)The design of an integrated ser-vice delivery platform must en-capsulate the IoT subsystems (sensors, gateway, and connec-tivity and data aggregation), de-vice management & monitoring applications, CRM systems, user interface, industrial governance and compliance systems, billing & By Supriyo Das, Vice President, Wipro TechnologyIOT-POWERED DIGITALIZATION OF WATER UTILITIES, ENABLING OUTCOME DRIVEN & EFFICIENT SYSTEMS Supriyo has over 25+ years of experience in the IT industry focused on product engineering and has led multiple software product development & life cycle management for various customers worldwide at Wipro
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