Microbial risk is one of the least visible and most time-lagged threats in water operations.

Traditional laboratory testing remains essential for compliance, but its slow turnaround limits an operator’s ability to respond to rapid changes that drive contamination events, treatment upsets, excessive chemical use, or unplanned downtime. Online microbial monitoring is emerging as a practical complement to lab testing, providing higher-frequency biological data that supports early warning, process optimisation, and more confident decision-making, particularly in industrial process water, cooling systems, reuse schemes, and high-risk environments such as Legionella-prone assets.

In this web briefing, Dr Kim Wu and Dr Corina Carpentier draw on BlueTech’s latest Horizon Scan to examine where online microbial monitoring is already delivering value, which applications are moving fastest, and what this shift means for operational risk, cost control, and digital water strategies.