The Automated Firewall Management importance and how EVO2 Router and Automation Tool can help you achieve your security goals

by Christos Vythopoulos, Head of Operations

Commercial vessels are acting as maritime companies’ remote offices, meaning that their continuous and safe operation, is of high importance. Especially nowadays, where most of the operations take place over the Internet, data integrity is crucial.

However, commercial vessels use Satellite terminals that have low bandwidth connection and due to the movement of the vessels around the globe, many times connection can be not only slow, but unreliable as well, meaning that they may experience frequent disconnections.

The constant change of security requirements adds very high administration costs for the IT departments of maritime companies, especially, when they must make firewall changes manually across several vessels and over a satellite connection.

Marpoint, always a pioneer in providing ICT solutions and services for the maritime industry, has automated that process, with the EVO² router and the Automation tool that is included in Marpoint’s Control Panel Management platform.

EVO² Router and Automation Tool

Through the automation tool, an IT manager/administrator can create a common or a separate firewall for their whole fleet, add, edit, delete, firewall rules, and synchronize the changes to their whole fleet with one click through Marpoint’s management platform.

For example, the IT administrator of a company with 40 vessels that share the same firewall, does not have to access each vessel one by one and add/edit or delete a rule. They can just edit the automation profile inside Marpoint’s Control Panel, select save and synchronize the firewall to the whole fleet in a few minutes and with minimum labor effort.

Benefits of automated firewall

Below we have concentrated on the benefits of an automated firewall, which is possible by choosing the EVO² router solution for your fleet, combined with the Automated Firewall Management tool.

Reduce administration costs and effort
Increase the number of changes that can be made during a maintenance process
Centralized and fleetwide administration, management, overview, and troubleshooting of the firewall
Monitor and compare the changes chronologically per vessel
Monitor which person (account) did the changes
Save thousands of manual hours per year