Fresh water is essential for our life and well-being. Reportedly, around 10 000 local governments in the EU have to improve their water management systems to be able to provide desirable service for the citizens. Consumers need to trust that the quality of water is good, and the water system operators need to predict threats to ensure safety and security. This is what Guardtime is facilitating in the NAIADES project.

Namely, Guardtime contributes to defining a new ICT architecture and technical solutions for sustainable water management, partnering with several other key players within the NAIADES project. The project, launched in June 2019 and funded by the Horizon 2020 programme, aims to bring the latest technology to the hands of water system operators and manage the cost level for water utilities by developing, implementing and integrating several innovative tools. One of the objectives is to develop a core administration functionality for water management companies and a marketplace functionality for datasets and related software tools. Guardtime puts its knowhow and blockchain technology into use to develop the platform’s security requirements and IoT database protection. Our main focus is on assuring data integrity, enabled by Guardtime’s KSI® Blockchain technology stack.

Guardtime will produce a security and privacy toolkit for smart water management in the project. This toolkit will support the deployment, integration and validation towards transforming the heterogeneous sensors and smart water technologies into a robust, automated and smarter water resource management and environmental monitoring.

Guardtime’s Head of R&D Cooperation, Henry Rõigas explains:

“NAIADES provides an opportunity for Guardtime to share and gain unique expertise in the utility operations field, whilst benefiting from cooperation with 18 partners. The project helps us to further develop our offerings based on the KSI® Blockchain Technology stack to develop and provide innovative security and privacy solutions for different critical infrastructure systems.”

About 1 million water system users will be affected directly during the project and 10+ million in the next 5 years. Water leakage incidents will be reduced, and unneeded disconnections avoided. Time period from locating the incident to fix will be shortened and transparency improved, as more information is asked from operators.

The project lasts 36 months and includes 3 different demo sites in Switzerland, Spain and Romania, where development results will be installed, and operators trained to use new software tools.