Hunter Water's corporate offices, remote locations, and data centres are interconnected through two segregated and secured wide area networks (WAN), with Corporate WAN exchanging the corporate data, and SCADA WAN exchanging the operational SCADA and telemetry data.

During the WAN and LAN Network Remediation project in August 2020, the ageing routers core to the WAN infrastructure were replaced at all identified sites with new router devices that supported the Software Defined (SD) - WAN technology. The key purpose behind implementing the SD-WAN technology was to reduce reliance on a single telecommunications carrier provider and shift towards a telco-agnostic approach for yielding tangible benefits.

These SD-WAN router devices are now ageing and will reach their end of life in August 2025, at this point, vendor support and maintenance of the underlying hardware and software will no longer be available. These network routers will lack the ongoing security patches, software upgrades, and may be prone to hardware failures, exposing the Corporate and SCADA networks to potential cyber-security threats and vulnerabilities, posing the risk of reliability and availability of network communications.

By replacing the ageing SD-WAN routers with new Juniper SD-WAN routers that include vendor support for ongoing security patches, software upgrades, and hardware replacement, this project aims to mitigate service continuity and regulatory risks.

In alignment with our Corporate Strategy, the SD-WAN Refresh project seeks to; design for the future, ensure systems are secure while enabling change, aim to achieve centralisation of device management, and improved usability for Digital IT, therefore Hunter Water wish to replace the existing SD-WAN Routers with Juniper SSR1300's & SSR130 SD-WAN Routers.