Drinking water-only company, SES Water, has appointed Zero Trust Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) vendor, iboss as part of its five-year, £413.9 million strategic AMP8 business development and investment plan.

SES Water supplies drinking water to over 750,000 people across Surrey, Kent and South London.

The supplier, which was purchased by FTSE 250 company, Pennon, for £380 million earlier this year, employs 400 staff across the UK, maintaining over 2,000 miles of water mains, eight treatment works, 23 pumping stations, and 31 operational service reservoirs and water towers.

SES Water has earmarked £413.9 million for its operations and development between 2025 and 2030, as well as supporting additional projects like the company’s smart metering programme and the refurbishment of one of its water softening plants.

As part of the company’s long-term investment strategy, SES Water has also begun working with iboss to improve its security posture. Initially providing a web proxy, iboss’ implementation now manages all of the water supplier’s web filtering, enabling the organisation to block all forms of malicious material, including domains, images, or even certain words, as well as blocking malware, ransomware and regions.

As a Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) organisation, SES Water must address unique security related regulatory measures such as CAF - a Cyber Assessment Framework for assessing cyber resilience.

According to the UK government, the UK is the third most targeted country in the world for cyber-attacks, after the U.S. and Ukraine. The government’s National Cyber Strategy 2022 and the Cyber Security Strategy 2022-2030 both recognised cyber threats to UK CNI as “an area of particular concern”.

SES Water has laid out a zero-trust roadmap, supported by specialists, iboss, with the goal of implementing Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) across all its digital infrastructure.

Matt Crockford, Head of Cyber Security at SES Water, said the iboss’ implementation “will give all employees ‘least privilege’ so users can only access the information they need and we can always authenticate them before they access any assets, data or programs.”

He added that the iboss solutions were exactly what the company was looking for to address its needs, “and at a fraction of the price of other vendors.”

The Iboss solution also supports the mental health and wellbeing of SES Water’s staff by monitoring users’ web activity, flagging any concerning behaviour from staff, and allowing the company’s team to carry out critical welfare checks on those individuals.

Simon Eappariello, Senior Vice President, EMEIA & APJ at iboss, added:

“With SES Water being a Critical National Infrastructure organisation, it is key that the company has effective and efficient cybersecurity measures in place. As it begins to implement its plan for the next five years, the water supplier is going to need strong network security as a foundation for all of the upcoming development.

“By enabling the digital transformation of SES Water, we’re not only potentially blocking millions of threats a year, improving their security posture, but we’re enabling them to securely move data and applications to the cloud to support hybrid working whilst giving them the flexibility to employ talent nationally to their growing team. When the company rolls out Zero Trust Network Access across its entire environment, SES will have an incredible level of security.”