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BIRDZ ENTRUSTS S3NS WITH SECURE MANAGEMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL DATA IN THE PUBLIC CLOUD
Published on 10/11/2023- Birdz, a wholly owned subsidiary of Veolia, develops large-scale smart technologies for customers such as municipal authorities, industrial operators, and public water and wastewater utilities, in France and across Europe.
- The company, which collects, processes and analyses data for water management and biodiversity protection, has turned to S3NS, a French joint venture controlled by Thales in partnership with Google Cloud, as it looks to keep its data stored and controlled in the cloud in France while reaping the performance and service-quality benefits offered by Google Cloud technologies.
As climate change bites and water becomes ever scarcer, monitoring technologies are playing an increasingly important role in measuring consumption in real time, detecting leaks, guiding pipe replacement work and, more generally, informing how operators communicate, troubleshoot, impose restrictions and make other key decisions.
Birdz has also developed sensors that can be fitted to waste containers to optimise collection planning, as well as a building energy management system that aggregates consumption data for electricity, gas and other energy sources, produces a comprehensive energy-use report and suggests corrective measures.
Data from more than 4 million smart sensors is stored in the company’s information systems, where it is categorised, analysed and shared with customers including municipal authorities and public water and wastewater utilities. Every day, Birdz receives close to 35 million messages from its sensors, each containing around 30 different data points such as water and energy consumption figures, temperature measurements, waste container fill levels, and alerts relating to leaks and other issues.
The ability to manage all this data effectively is essential for preserving resources and protecting biodiversity. Security is also a major consideration, since the individual data points and aggregate values provide insights into the consumption patterns, habits and daily activities of the households, municipal authorities and industrial operators that use Birdz’s sensors. This need for protection is especially important when the data comes from critical national infrastructure providers.
With the Local Controls by S3NS offering, Birdz is secure in the knowledge that its data is stored in France, with a French technical support team, encrypted access control, and greater transparency and control over cloud admin activity. Other benefits include tight cost control, advanced data-processing capabilities, and a serverless, fully scalable infrastructure for the effective management of large volumes of data.
The Local Controls by S3NS offering includes BigQuery, a big-data analytics platform based on machine learning and artificial intelligence, which Birdz uses to process the vast amounts of environmental data it collects. Birdz also uses other components of S3NS’s offering to manage and route messages from its sensors, as well as for easier and faster networking in its managed container business.
« At Birdz, we help our customers address their critical resource-management challenges through our comprehensive expertise in IoT sensors, IoT connectivity and data processing. Working with S3NS was therefore a natural choice. This partnership aligns with our strategy of supporting local digital transformation through highly secure, cloud-based services. Looking further ahead, we fully support S3NS’s goal of transitioning to the trusted cloud. »
CIO of Birdz
« S3NS is pleased to be able to bring advanced, highly secure cloud technologies to Birdz, whose solutions play a key role in adaptation to climate change. We are honoured that Birdz has chosen our offering – with its important data location and security guarantees – as it looks to deliver an even higher standard of service to its customers. Through this partnership, we are proud to be serving public and private water and waste management operators and, more broadly, to be playing our part in more careful and efficient resource management. »
S3NS CEO
AS3NS has experienced strong growth since its founding in June 2022, with a team of more than 90 employees as of 2023. The company’s ANSSI SecNumCloud-certified cloud services will be available from the second half of 2024, marking the transition to a trusted cloud that protects public-sector and business data from the application of extraterritorial laws.
[1]SecNumCloud is a framework developed by ANSSI, France’s national agency for information system security, which allows for the certification of cloud services demonstrating a high level of security and trust (the “trusted cloud”)»
About S3NS
S3NS is an innovative alliance between Thales, a French leader in cybersecurity in Europe, and Google Cloud, a global leader in cloud technology. S3NS aims to provide French public institutions and private companies with public cloud offerings that are highly secure, enabling them to transition to the ANSSI SecNumCloud-certified trusted cloud. S3NS is a French company controlled by Thales.
About Birdz
Birdz, a subsidiary of Veolia, is a pioneer in remote water meter reading and a leader in environmental IoT technologies for smart cities. Founded over 20 years ago, the company has developed an extensive suite of sensors backed by systems for data exploitation, control, transmission and analytics. To date, Birdz has deployed more than 10 million sensors, collecting millions of data points each day to support improved resource management.