HCWW secures resilient water services in Egypt with F5 ADSP

Egypt’s Holding Company for Water and Wastewater (HCCW) is modernizing its infrastructure and cybersecurity using the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) to increase app performance and resilience, empower digital innovation, and comply with stringent new data requirements that are a pillar of the nation’s Digital Egypt 2030 vision.

Business challenge

The Egyptian Holding Company for Water and Wastewater (HCWW) is responsible for treating, distributing, and managing drinking water and wastewater services across Egypt. As a state-owned organization responsible for delivering water and wastewater services to a growing population of more than 120 million people, it operates 25 subsidiary companies and provides services critical to every aspect of Egyptian society.

In alignment with the nation’s Digital Egypt 2030 vision, HCWW has been modernizing its on-premises digital infrastructure and services. As part of this process, the organization plans to create a secure, resilient platform capable of meeting growing customer expectations for digital tools to help them monitor water use and pay bills, for instance. According to Ahmadullah Al Madany, Network and Infrastructure Manager at HCWW, gaining the trust of those customers is an emphasis in a culture keen to protect identities and data.

One pillar of Egypt 2030 is a new the Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL) that sets strict privacy mandates for processing personal data such as the customer billing, water usage, and employee records handled by HCWW. The PDPL goes into effect late in 2026, but HCWW needed to address compliance proactively as the company’s digital architecture evolved.

The digital modernization initiatives were no simple task, however, given the fragmented legacy security technologies distributed across the company’s subsidiaries. The situation was further complicated by the rise of AI-enabled cyberattacks. Critical challenges related to application availability, security, and performance included increased exposure to threats, inadequate incident response, inconsistent app performance under load, and difficulty scaling as digital services expand.

Solutions

After vendor discussions began in 2024, HCWW chose the F5 ADSP to build a secure, reliable, and scalable system.The organization selected F5 based on its strong reputation as a leader in app delivery and security as well as the ease of collaborating with F5 experts based in Cairo.

“F5 is helping us improve our cybersecurity and build a more stable and reliable environment to serve all subsidiaries,” says Ahmed Shawky, Subsidiaries Follow-Up Manager in the Department of IT for HCWW.

The partnership started with development of a strategy and roadmap for the company’s cybersecurity and resilience transformation, including how HCWW could build and maintain confidence among all its stakeholders. The first stage of the strategy strengthens cybersecurity, website resilience, and mobile app security, and the second stage focuses on a five-year transformation program for the subsidiaries. As part of F5 ADSP, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) proved to be the ideal solution for providing a comprehensive suite of programmable and automatable application services suitable for HCWW’s hybrid workloads. BIG-IP LTM intelligently manages incoming network traffic to ensure apps are always reliable, secure, and optimized.

To support expansion of its digital services, especially mobile apps for customers, HCWW also deployed F5 web application firewall (WAF)services in both software and Software as a Service (SaaS) form factors, F5 BIG-IP Zero Trust Access (formerly BIG-IP Access Policy Manager) to improve authentication and access control for stronger API security, and Distributed Cloud Bot Defense to mitigate automated attacks. This platform-centric approach protects HCWW’s APIs and web and mobile apps against layer 7 DDoS attacks, increasingly sophisticated malicious bots, and the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, ensuring the security and integrity of apps and customer data.

Results

Improve app availability and resilience

The need for greater resilience came into sharper focus following a July 2025 technical outage that affected key telecommunications infrastructure in Cairo’s business district, leading to widespread disruption to key services and businesses across the country. HCWW quickly deployed F5 Distributed Cloud DNS, which enabled use of the F5 global network of regional points of presence, delivering fast, secure, and reliable DNS services, global server load balancing, and DDoS protection across the distributed HCWW infrastructure.

The HCWW website was back online in less than two hours, well ahead of many other large organizations. By minimizing DNS latency and mitigating outages, Distributed Cloud DNS helps ensure uninterrupted access to customer portals, billing platforms, and smart-grid APIs. The incident prompted the HCWW team to develop complete redundancy to guard against any similar nationwide incident in the future.

As part of its business continuity planning, HCWW is developing a disaster recovery site built on BIG-IP LTM, with BIG-IP Advanced WAF and Distributed Cloud DNS Load Balancer providing protection across data centers. High availability and zone awareness functions maintain data collection device (DCD) operations—such as those used for water meters—even when a node or an entire data center fails. The company plans to establish a second disaster recovery site soon to further build its resilience.

Defend against AI-enabled cyberthreats

F5 ADSP strengthens HCWW protection, changing the organization’s approach to cybersecurity and resilience while positioning it for PDPL compliance.

“We are not just improving our services,” says Shawky. “We are building a security-first culture to protect a critical national utility and safeguard our customers’ rights and data.”

Simplify operations to empower innovation

“Collectively, F5 solutions have helped us simplify our operations and respond faster to issues,” says Al Madany. “This has enabled us to move from a reactive to a more proactive approach, where we prevent problems from arising in the first place and dedicate more resources to the continued improvement of services.”

Build trust

The changes help HCWW build customer trust that data will remain secure as the organization evolves.

“Our collaboration with F5 extends beyond just buying and deploying solutions,” says Shawky. “We have developed a close partnership that includes local-language advice, support teams, and training. This has allowed our entire team to change their approach to security, increasing trust between HCWW, its subsidiaries, and its customers while allowing us to manage security at a national level.”

Support digital expansion

HCWW looks forward to a long-term partnership with F5 that extends the holding company’s successful transformation to its subsidiaries across Egypt. This will be particularly important as the nation extends the delivery of water and wastewater services—and related digital services—to remote rural areas under a national sustainable development and quality-of-life project known as the Haya Karima Initiative.

“Water is the most important utility, without which society cannot function,” Shawky says. “We’re excited to continually improve the digital services that are so essential to its provision, including enabling customers to monitor their usage and pay bills securely. This project is ambitious in its scope but is essential to ensure that citizens and residents can access water services in line with the Egypt’s 2030 vision.”

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