After deploying NetMotion’s mobile connectivity solution to its 2,600 field-based employees in 2017, UK-based Yorkshire Water’s experience improved so radically that the utility extended the full NetMotion suite to its entire workforce.

Now, in addition to providing its mobile workers with rock-solid Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity, Yorkshire Water’s IT team has the network visibility and diagnostics capabilities to ensure business continuity.

Having used a traditional VPN for 15 years, Yorkshire Water’s switch to NetMotion in 2017 resolved a major challenge faced by many companies, especially in the utilities sector – requiring always-on connectivity for a large, field-based workforce.

For Yorkshire Water’s 2,600 field technicians, whose work touches nearly every aspect of water delivery and quality. access to reliable connectivity is helping the utility reach its mission of delivering clean water and sanitation to over 5 million customers every day without fail.

Martin Day, Technical Lead at Yorkshire Water summed up the need for a robust mobile solution:

“If we don’t have connectivity, we don’t have anything. It underpins everything that we do.”

In 2019, Yorkshire Water added NetMotion’s visibility and diagnostics tools, giving its IT team insight and control over what happens at the network, device and application levels. They can see details about Wi-Fi and cellular network traffic volumes, identify where technicians are located, understand whether and how often technicians are connected, what applications are being used, and how those individual applications are behaving. 

Now, whenever employees encounter persistent cellular connectivity issues, Yorkshire Water’s IT team is able to generate detailed network performance reports that it presents to its current telco provider, EE, for faster resolution and service upgrades.

NetMotion platform used by Yorkshire Water to pinpoint data leakage to China

On the security front, NetMotion’s platform has been used by the utility to pinpoint data leakage to China, which was quickly investigated and remedied.

Adopting NetMotion has brought a raft of other benefits to Yorkshire Water, including:

• Single sign-on, replacing a separate VPN login
• Device authentication, eliminating the need for separate tokens and licensing
• Support for home and third-party Wi-Fi networks
• Military-grade encryption standards suitable for restricted sites
• Resiliency and failover for the system between two Yorkshire Water data centres
• Greater internal control over security
• Seamless patching and upgrades

Martin Day continued:

“We’ve built enormous trust with our teams in the field as well as the entire business. The field technicians are saying this is miles better, and adoption is being driven by them. They walk away happy, they tell their colleagues, they tell their managers, and the managers are happy with us. For Yorkshire Water, NetMotion’s connectivity solutions have been a game-changer, which is why we’ve deployed their solutions across our whole business.”

NetMotion’s proven ability to secure and optimize connectivity has given Yorkshire Water the means to proactively rectify connectivity issues, understand security threats, reduce vendor costs and ensure continuity across its entire business Not only has the utility now adopted additional visibility, diagnostics and analytics features, it has also expanded NetMotion to 10,000 licenses.

“For utility companies like Yorkshire Water, connectivity directly impacts the service they are able to deliver to customers,” said Achi Lewis, EMEA Director, NetMotion Software. “The transformation among Yorkshire Water’s field technicians has been remarkable and very gratifying. Once customers like Yorkshire Water see how quickly and easily they can scale up with NetMotion’s platform, they’re ready to jump in feet first.”