Connected Water Has a Trust Problem

I’ve spent 25 years selling, designing, and defending irrigation systems: first at Rain Bird, then ValleyCrest, Jain, and Husqvarna Water. In all that time, I never once had a customer ask me if their controller could be hacked.

That’s changing.

The recent cyberattacks on U.S. water systems made national news, and I’ve had more than one irrigation and water-management leader tell me, “That’s not us, that’s municipal water.” They’re right. Commercial irrigation is not a city treatment plant. But the operating issues underneath both are starting to look a lot more similar, and that should get your attention.

Think about what’s happened to a typical irrigation system over the last ten years. Controllers, sensors, pumps, valves, telemetry, weather stations, remote access, cloud dashboards, and reporting tools are all now part of the operating layer of water management. What used to be a box on a wall with a dial is now a node on a network.

That connectivity is a good thing. It’s how we cut labor, catch leaks before they become disasters, and prove water savings to a customer or a board. I’ve built my career on that promise.

But connectivity doesn’t just add capability. It adds exposure, and it changes the standard of responsibility that comes with selling and supporting these systems.

Here’s where I think a lot of irrigation and water-management companies are getting this wrong. The instinct is to treat this as a bolt-on: hire an IT consultant, publish a password policy, call it done.

That’s not the lesson. The real lesson is that connected water products now have to be designed, sold, installed, and supported as operational systems, not just as devices. A controller isn’t just a piece of hardware anymore. It’s part of an operating environment that someone, somewhere, is responsible for keeping trustworthy.

That has real implications for how our industry does business.

Secure configuration has to become part of the product experience. Right now, too much of this gets left to whoever installs the system, a contractor who’s paid to get the heads spraying on schedule, not to harden network settings. If the default configuration isn’t reasonably secure out of the box, we’re setting our customers up to fail, and eventually, one of them will.

Remote access is a controlled operating function, not a convenience feature. We sell remote access as a selling point: check your system from anywhere, adjust a zone from your phone. Fine. But every remote access point is also a door. Who has a key, how it’s issued, and how it’s revoked needs to be treated with the same seriousness as who has a key to the pump house.

Manufacturers and service providers need to train the people in the field better. The contractors who install and maintain these systems are the front line. Most of them came up learning irrigation, not IT. If we want secure systems in the ground, we have to give installers real training and documentation, not a PDF nobody reads.

Customers are going to start asking a different question. For years, the sales conversation was “how much water will this save me?” That question isn’t going away, but a second one is joining it: can this system be trusted, monitored, documented, and recovered if something goes wrong? I’d bet within a few years, that second question shows up in every RFP for a commercial or municipal irrigation contract.

The future of this industry was never just going to be smarter controllers and more efficient drip systems, even though those matter enormously and always will. The future is connected water management, and connected water management runs on trust: trust that the system does what it says, trust that it’s being watched, trust that if something breaks or gets breached, there’s a plan to recover.

The companies that understand this early, that build trust into the product instead of bolting it on after the fact, are going to have a real strategic advantage. The companies that keep treating connectivity as a feature on a spec sheet, instead of an operating responsibility they now own, are going to find themselves exposed. Maybe not this year. But soon.

I’ve watched this industry move from hand-turned valves to satellite-linked ET controllers over the course of my career. The technology curve has been the fun part. The trust curve is the part we need to get right next.

Thanks for reading Water Trends with Richard Restuccia. If this one got you thinking, forward it to someone on your ops or product team. This is a conversation worth having internally before a customer forces it.

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