// CASE STUDY · UTILITIES · WATER
A water utility brought off end-of-life infrastructure and hardened
- Server 2003 → 2019/2022
- ESXi 6 → Hyper-V
- Domain built from scratch
The problem
A water utility was running production systems on VMware ESXi 6 and Windows Server 2003, both long past end of life, in an environment with little security in place and no real hardening. For a utility, that is not just technical debt.
What I did
- Migrated off ESXi 6 and Server 2003 onto modern Hyper-V with Server 2019 and 2022.
- Deployed a Windows domain, then configured and hardened it properly rather than accepting defaults.
- Built custom LTSC workstation images so the endpoint fleet is consistent and stripped to what the environment needs.
- Reconfigured the network and hardened the environment against the threats a utility actually faces.
Where it landed
A utility running supported, hardened, and consistently managed infrastructure instead of operating critical services on platforms that stopped receiving security updates years ago.
Something similar coming up?
Engagements like this start with a call about what you are actually dealing with. No hardware, no software, and no installation is sold here, which is the independence policy in one line.