Strengthening SCADA Cybersecurity and Automated Reporting for the City of Fresno

The City of Fresno Water Division serves approximately 142,000 customers across 114 square miles through a complex drinking water system encompassing treatment facilities, distribution infrastructure, and SCADA operations. Aging software approaching end-of-support exposed the Division to cybersecurity risk, as unsupported platforms no longer receive security patches or product updates. Operators also contended with an inefficient legacy reporting system that required manual effort to generate, send, and organize reports the Division relied on for state compliance and day-to-day troubleshooting.

Our team managed a system-wide platform upgrade, a network architecture overhaul, and a full replacement of the reporting infrastructure. The team upgraded the Division’s AVEVA Plant SCADA system to the current version, preserved all existing functionality, and addressed longstanding operator pain points. The upgrade accelerated the weekly tag and equipment update procedure and reduced SCADA system startup time by more than 66 percent.

To strengthen cybersecurity, our engineers modernized the network and implemented segmentation across 17 networks using local area networks (LAN) and firewalls. This architecture prioritized critical operational technology (OT) traffic, including programmable logic controller (PLC) communications, while controlling access to less time-sensitive data. For reporting, we replaced the legacy platform with AVEVA Reports for Operations and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), automating report generation and distribution based directly on operator feedback. AVEVA Tier 1 and Tier 2 Historian instances consolidated current and future plant data into a single, centralized environment.