CASE STUDY

Sea Pioneer Shipping applies Cyber Safety Best Practices onboard with UNI Virtualization solution

The mission of Sea Pioneer Shipping Corporation is to cover clients’ needs with professionally operated bulkers and tanker fleets in the most efficient way, warranting a safe, cost-effective, and trouble-free transportation of cargo.

Upon a careful review of Cyber Security requirements and in line with best practices to be applied, the ICT Department of Sea Pioneer has chosen to implement UNI Virtualization Server solution onboard their ships.

Τhe Challenge

Updating their current vessel IT infrastructure, Sea Pioneer was in search of a reliable solution that would provide the means to centrally manage the operation and user access of critical functions and applications onboard, such as their Planned Maintenance System.

Providing a safe “host” for the PMS onboard instead of a single PC, as well as proper access by users and proper communication with the office was a top priority.

The Planned Maintenance System of a shipping company aims to ensure safe and reliable vessel operations by allowing ship owners and ship managers to plan, execute, and document vessel maintenance whilst complying with Class and manufacturer requirements.

Mr. George Christodoulou, ICT Manager of Sea Pioneer Shipping notes:

As part of Sea Pioneer’s commitment to excellence, the ICT Department must respectively make sure that all the software applications onboard our ships and assets connected to the network are managed in an efficient and cyber-secure manner.

Ensuring the business continuity of critical applications onboard such as our PMS, every node of the UNI system can create and hold differential snapshots for up to 40 days for every Virtual Machine each node hosts.

As part of our IAM strategy, the Virtualization environment configured under the UNI system which consists of the main point of work of the vessel is built with smart policies that provide users the “least” privilege based on their work onboard.

UNI policies ensure that all accounts have frequent password changes to prevent account intrusion from known passwords.

For no “direct” access to the VM’s from the users, the MarPoint solution is delivered with Linux thin clients that are used for accessing any UNI-hosted VM.”

George Christodoulou – ICT Manager

Best Practices Applied by MarPoint on Sea Pioneer Ships

Class-Approved for Cyber Safety Triple Cluster Server Solution
No Single-Point of Failure: triple back up of all business files and applications, i.e. pms, e-navigation, email, and others.
Disaster Recovery: quick recovery of all IT infrastructure after a cyber incident
PCs Management: Thin Clients Performance Monitoring & Patching
USB Management Policy and monitoring
NAS Management and Monitoring
Vulnerability Management – Asset Management: Monitoring of all IT Assets on board the vessel, status, and performance assessment
Endpoint Protection & Remote Management
24/7/365 support