Modernising the systems Australia can’t afford to switch off

Australia’s electricity and water providers were confronting escalating climate, demand and cyber threats that exposed the fragility of ancient operational systems even as the skills to keep the lights on and water flowing aged out of the workforce.

Senior technology leaders told iTnews that many core systems were decades past their design life and increasingly brittle under modern pressures. The challenge was no longer whether to upgrade but how to modernise without disrupting services that can never be allowed to fail.

Greater Western Water CIO Anafrid Bennet said utilities must navigate a volatile and complex environment defined by escalating climate events, century-old assets and sharpening regulatory scrutiny.

“We need to provide 24/7 services to our customers and community [while navigating] an evolving technology and threat landscape. And it is a volatile environment,” Bennet said.

“So we would definitely be holding risks as a result of legacy infrastructure, which means we need to think and be a step ahead: What it would look like; what would be the total cost of ownership; what would be our technical debt?”

In the absence of a clear path to modernise their systems, utilities and other critical infrastructure providers were carefully considering their risk management plans

Bennet emphasised that utilities must plan ahead to resolve “technical debt” before disruptions occur.

“First thing first … is to ensure that you have resilience by design,” she said, adding that organisations must invest in their people because “they are the cornerstone of business resilience”.

“So continually invest and build that muscle memory,” she said.

CS Energy CIO Johnny Serrano said the risk of inaction was significant, particularly as specialists with arcane knowledge aged out of the workforce.

“You could have all these great sequences in place, but if there is a key skills gap… until you’re in there, you’re not going to realise how it’s going to go.”

The risk of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) teams being out of step with each other compounded the challenge of running, building and maintaining critical infrastructure, he said.

To reduce risk, Serrano’s teams used virtualised environments and digital replicas or ‘twins’ of ageing systems to test upgrades safely before introducing them into live environments. This controlled approach enabled utilities to understand the implications of change, he said.

The biggest challenge to aligning the two domains of IT and OT was cultural as much as technical, said Dan Spada, Kinetic IT Principal of Service Integration.

IT and OT operate with different priorities, and with differing consequences of failure, he said.

“IT outages are largely inconvenient but OT outages … can stop production; they can cost millions of dollars an hour, disrupt core systems, and even cause really, really serious safety effects.”

Spada said coordinated governance and shared visibility across IT and OT environments were critical to safe transformation. And it is a need that has grown as organisations adopt frameworks that bring both domains into a unified operational picture.

“Looking at it from a service integration lens, how do we bring the two together while respecting their priorities and goals? At Kinetic IT, we adapt frameworks such as ITIL in terms of incident management, [program] management etc—as well as Service Integration and Management—to create that shared language of understanding.”

Learning to dance with your partner (Who leads in the IT/OT tango?)

A persistent challenge when modernising critical infrastructure was the cultural and operational divide between information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) teams.

Each domain had different priorities: IT optimised for agility, rapid patching and continuous improvement, while OT emphasised stability, safety and predictability. These competing imperatives slow transformation and boosted risk of misalignment.

Operational teams often scrutinised assets designed to run for decades with limited downtime and highly specialised technical requirements. In contrast, IT evolved systems relatively rapidly that must be secure in a convulsive digital threat landscape. Without deliberate coordination, change in one domain could have unintended consequences for the other.

Service integration frameworks bridge these differences. By establishing shared governance, unified change control and common visibility across environments, critical infrastructure providers could limit unintended interactions to foster safer modernisation. That empowered both sides to understand dependencies and anticipate downstream effects of modernisation.

As infrastructure became digitised, the need to align these historically disparate, discrete and sometimes competitive worlds was becoming a defining requirement for resilience.

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