Águas do Douro e Paiva Invests Nearly €300,000 in Disaster Recovery Data Center to Secure Water Supply for 1.8 Million People
June 23, 2026
Águas do Douro e Paiva Invests Nearly €300,000 in Disaster Recovery Data Center to Secure Water Supply for 1.8 Million People
Águas do Douro e Paiva (AdDP), the Portuguese utility responsible for water collection, treatment, and supply across 20 municipalities in northern Portugal, is investing nearly €300,000 ($342,000) in the construction of a new disaster recovery data center. The project is designed to bolster the resilience of the IT, telecommunications, and industrial control systems that underpin water delivery to approximately 1.8 million residents.
The investment reflects an increasingly widespread trend among critical infrastructure operators worldwide: strengthening disaster recovery capabilities through redundant data centers. AdDP’s new facility is part of a broader technological modernization strategy aimed at ensuring service continuity during failures, maintenance work, or incidents that could disrupt the main data center. While full technical specifications have not been disclosed, the company confirmed that the new data center has been designed with a high-availability architecture, incorporating redundancy across all critical subsystems.
Key systems, including power supply, uninterruptible power supply (UPS) units, climate control, and communications, are each configured to single-handedly handle the facility’s full load. This eliminates single points of failure and allows maintenance to be performed without interrupting operations. The infrastructure also includes a high-security technical room featuring fire resistance, environmental control, and automatic detection and suppression systems using clean agents, alongside specific measures to protect data and critical equipment.
Interconnection between the new disaster recovery site and the main data center is provided through AdDP’s proprietary fiber-optic network, ensuring high-capacity communications and reducing dependence on external infrastructure. The move underscores a growing recognition among water utilities and other essential service providers that data center redundancy is no longer optional but a core component of operational resilience in an era of increasing cyber and physical threats.
Source: datacenterdynamics
