A major Brazilian public water and sanitation utility faced growing cyber risk across its IT and OT systems. Core citizen services—billing, GIS mapping, and mobile field operations—were exposed to ransomware that could cascade into operational disruption. Testing recovery procedures on live systems was unsafe, while outdated disaster recovery labs created a false sense of security with stale data and simplified networks. Continuity plans remained largely theoretical, leaving the organization vulnerable to prolonged downtime, compliance failures, and public service outages.

VM2020 CyberVR created current-state Thin Digital Twins of the utility’s IT and OT environments, enabling realistic recovery testing in a fully isolated recovery environment. Immutable snapshots ensured clean data, while automated orchestration allowed teams to rehearse incident response, malware eradication, and service restoration without risk to production. By replicating network segmentation and interdependencies, CyberVR provided a faithful model of the production stack, making every recovery exercise safe, repeatable, and regulator-ready.

The implementation effort spanned infrastructure, cybersecurity, and operations teams. Together, we mapped critical billing and GIS systems, replicated IT/OT network boundaries, and developed automated recovery runbooks. Field operations staff participated in multidisciplinary exercises to ensure mobile service continuity during an outage. This cross-team collaboration built clarity of roles and responsibilities while producing the documented evidence auditors required.