Compliance with regulatory requirements and consideration of business needs: REBM kills two birds with one stone with Oodrive Work

450

employees

Solution deployed

years ahead of schedule!

« The Oodrive Work solution meets both ANSSI requirements and the collaborative needs of our teams. »

Taher Belhadj Ali,

Head of Information Systems Security for L’Eau Bordeaux Métropole

The Bordeaux Métropole Water Authority is a public industrial and commercial institution with financial autonomy and legal personality.

Created in December 2020 by decision of the metropolitan council, the authority has been the new operator of Bordeaux Métropole’s public water service since January 1, 2023.

Succeeding Suez, the Bordeaux Métropole Water Authority has taken on the tasks of steering, managing, producing, and distributing drinking water and industrial water for the entire metropolitan area. This comes with a major security challenge: the obligation to protect its IT systems against any eventuality in order to guarantee business continuity. Its CISO, Taher Belhadj Ali, tells us how the company solved both problems simultaneously thanks to Oodrive Work.

L’Eau Bordeaux Métropole: a sensitive public body with a critical IT system that needs to be secured

Succeeding Suez, the long-standing delegatee for water management in the Bordeaux metropolitan area, REBM has taken on responsibility for the public and industrial management of drinking water across an area of 518 km2. These missions make it a sensitive organization that must equip itself with a highly secure IT system, with three objectives:

To guarantee the continuity of its activity in order to ensure the distribution of drinking water to residents.
To protect its sensitive data against all types of incidents (malicious acts, negligence, or accidents).
To meet the requirements imposed by ANSSI on public bodies.

Indeed, if the information system of the Bordeaux Métropole water authority were to suffer a cyberattack or hardware failure, this could potentially have consequences for the entire drinking water distribution network in the Bordeaux region (and its 814,000 inhabitants).

This is therefore a critical information system governed by stringent security standards. Hence the search for a suitable collaborative tool.

In a context where public and private actors are increasingly exposed to cyber risks, protecting sensitive organizations is a top priority for regulatory authorities such as ANSSI. “This solution had to secure our data, ensure our compliance with regulatory requirements, and also meet our internal collaborative needs.”

This security requirement is accompanied by another issue, which is less critical but nonetheless essential: the need to implement a solution that is easy to access and use for end users (a large proportion of the 450 people who make up the workforce of L’Eau Bordeaux Métropole) and that is scalable.

« We needed a secure solution for the exchange of sensitive data, particularly for the contractual information processed by our industrial information system. »

Taher Belhadj Ali,

Head of Information Systems Security for L’Eau Bordeaux Métropole

Oodrive Work, a collaborative tool that addresses the challenges faced by sensitive public bodies

When the Bordeaux Métropole Water Authority sought a collaborative solution on a secure cloud, Oodrive was the obvious choice: its CISO was familiar with the publisher’s tools, having used them in previous positions. He knows that they are easy to deploy and learn, simple to administer, and extremely secure. In short, they are particularly well suited to the needs of a sensitive public body, especially given their SecNumCloud certification. This prior experience, combined with in-depth knowledge of the benefits of these tools, greatly facilitated the deployment of Oodrive Work within the public company.

It took just two weeks to set up the tool. At the same time, the support provided by the Oodrive teams encouraged rapid user adoption, as users quickly realized how intuitive the solution was and how interoperable it was. This allows it to be integrated with existing tools and workflows and put to immediate use, not only to manage internal exchanges, but also to handle external communications, both with the Bordeaux metropolitan area and with numerous third-party administrations.

But it is the security aspect that makes all the difference in the eyes of Taher Belhadj Ali, whose favorite feature is the collaborative document sharing with enhanced authentication via a one-time password (OTP). For the CISO, Oodrive’s solution is perfectly suited to the challenges faced by sensitive public bodies such as the Bordeaux Metropolitan Water Authority.

“Thanks to Work, REBM benefits from a highly secure environment for its data exchanges: while all signs point to an increase in cyber risk, Oodrive allows us to remain calm, yet vigilant.”

In this context, the fact that Work is a 100% French tool is not insignificant: “We are also very sensitive to the idea that our data is hosted on French territory, which guarantees its sovereignty.”

Finally, while Oodrive Work fully meets compliance requirements and internal business needs, the tool’s main advantage is its sustainability.

On the one hand, the solution’s scalability makes it possible to anticipate future staff increases—L’Eau Bordeaux Métropole is expected to have close to 900 employees by 2026.

On the other hand, ANSSI requirements are set to become more stringent with the upcoming publication of a new version of the military programming law (LPM), which paves the way for the future of French defense.

The benefits of Oodrive Work

SecNumCloud certification

Oodrive’s SecNumCloud qualification makes Work a specially accredited solution for managing sensitive documents and restricted content.

Ease of use

Oodrive Work features an intuitive interface designed to be easy for end users to learn, reducing training needs without sacrificing security.

Ease of administration

The Oodrive Work solution offers numerous access rights administration features that are very easy for IT and security managers to configure.