Digitalisation in maritime can optimize all operations at sea, from vessel tracking to crew welfare, but the transformation from legacy systems has notably been slow for the industry. Regulations are slow to catch up, crews are not yet properly trained, the industry is not known for its transparency and cybersecurity breaches are sure to rear their ugly heads in all the transition and learning. America, known for its technology expertise, may well be where global shipping is looking to solve these unique digital transformation issues.
The Boston Globe reminds us: “at a time when you can track every mile of a package of Hanes boxer shorts as it travels from the Amazon warehouse to your door, we lack the technology to track a 40-foot-long shipping container carrying thousands of the same shorts from China to the US.”
Last year the Globe reported how Connecticut-based maritime publisher Marine Money hosted its first ever pitch day in the United States. Marine Money chairman Jim Lawrence acknowledged in his opening remarks that the field is so new they didn’t even know what to call it: “Financial technologies are called Fintech, Medical Technologies are Medtech, but what do we call technology for shipping? Some say it should be Bluetech, others Shiptech, or Martech for maritime technology. Nobody can agree on even the name.’” The Globe article proposed Boston as a future maritime innovation hub, which is not surprising when there are 50 Universities there. The “birthplace of the American revolution” may just become the birthplace of a shipping technology revolution.
Alexis Madrigal writes in The Atlantic: “For decades, whole regions, nations even, have tried to model themselves on a particular ideal of innovation, the lifeblood of the modern economy. From Apple to Facebook, Silicon Valley’s freewheeling ecosystem of new, nimble corporations created massive wealth and re-tilted the world’s economic axis.” That nimble spirit of innovation may have grown into giant monolithic companies like Google and Facebook, but perhaps it is the spirit we need to fight a new enemy, one that is piggybacking on our new way of doing things – a reliance on electronic systems - to create havoc and harm”. That havoc has reared its ugly head in the shipping industry, with the past three years bringing cyberattacks for Maersk, COSCO, James Fisher and Sons (JFS), Kuwait shipping industry, US Coast Guard, and the UK marine engineering consultancy, London Offshore Consultants (LOC) Group. The Wall Street Journal reports that: “Cybersecurity was ranked as the second-highest risk for shipping in 2019, behind natural disasters, according to a survey of over 2,500 risk managers conducted by Allianz.”
We spoke to Amit Basu, Vice President CIO & CISO of International Seaways, Inc. who will be speaking on “Cyber Resilience in the Digital Era” at our CMA Shipping event. He shared with us that he is “currently evaluating an AI/ML based technology solution from an American company for our ships to gain visibility into potential threats.” Basu continued: “the solution offered by the US company includes the AI/ML based technology to detect anomalies and also provides security analysts for 24x7 analysis of the anomalies and alerting. In totality, this solution meets our need for monitoring the ships’ networks uniquely.
Today, the IT networks onboard ships has very little visibility from shoreside and the need for monitoring the traffic there is higher than ever. Nowadays, IT and OT systems onboard ships are increasingly being networked together and more frequently connected to the internet. This brings a greater risk of unauthorized access and malicious attacks to ships’ systems and networks.”
Evan Efstathiou, CEO of Burmester & Vogel, Founder of Skysail Advisors Ltd. and a speaker at our upcoming CMA event contends: “Maritime technologies here have access to talent and insights which we can carry over from other industries already ahead in these areas. The US has unprecedented knowledge and know-how in the technologies that underpin the disruption opportunities we are seeing in digitalization, from predictive analytics, machine learning and AI to Blockchain.”
Efstathiou continues: “There is deeper access to venture capital and private equity for technology investment in the US than other regions. Already with the venture investments in companies like Flexport and Nautilus Labs we are seeing investors coming in from outside of the industry.
“These investors bring in valuable expertise in software and scaling businesses which complements the shipping-specific expertise brought by strategic investors. It is my view that the winning formula is to have deep industry knowledge in shipping and combine it with access to capital, disruptive technology and insights into the market's needs.”
