Reliable Synchronization of Mission Critical Data Over Poor Connectivity

Introduction

Ross Maritime is a shipping agency headquartered in Mobile, Alabama that specializes in streamlining the passage of passenger and commercial vessels through the Port of Mobile, the ports of the Gulf Coast, and further. We specialize in logistical solutions to meet a vessel owner’s needs, including everything from agency services to freight forwarding.

Compliance and Safety

Our critical use case for Resilio was compliance. The nature of our work requires close coordination with a myriad of government agencies, from US Customs to the individual Port Authority that oversees each harbor. Each public agency and private ship management company requires careful tracking of documents like customs forms, cargo manifests, and passenger logs. It’s absolutely essential that this sensitive data is kept secure and updated.

Ship at sea

No More Driving

Before Resilio we were limited to physical means like USB thumb drives to move data back and forth between vessels, port facilities, and our central office. This was insecure, unreliable and incredibly cumbersome and time-consuming. Employees spent hours driving back and forth between ports, sometimes late at night or on the weekend depending on when vessels were arriving or departing.  

To move beyond the manual movement of physical media, we needed a solution that could utilize a wide array of onboard communications options while at the same time recognizing that any one or all of these communication channels may be unavailable at any moment.   The solution needed to be incredibly fast and fault-tolerant.  But it also needed to be easy to use by those onboard the vessels tasked with maintaining compliance. In our search for a solution, cloud services were out of the question in light of the often poor connectivity, where uploading to or downloading from the cloud is difficult or impossible. We also regularly are entrusted with sensitive personal and financial data as part of our operations and needed a solution where such data existed at rest exclusively on our own private infrastructure. 

Brent Nevison is the CEO of Wolverine Investigations, an IT consulting firm whom we retained to help us in our search. Brent recognized that Resilio’s P2P technology provided a more secure alternative to the public cloud and a more reliable means of moving critical data over unreliable satellite, cellular or point to point connections between vessels when in range. He introduced us to the product, saying that “Resilio would keep Ross Maritime fully compliant and would be very easy to use for those onboard the vessels. All of the required documents would be available in an easy to access folder constantly and automatically kept in sync with shore facilities, while at the same time delivering on the security and reliability aspects required.” 

Resilio offered an ideal solution. It’s fully cross-platform, so we run an instance on a central Linux server in our main office, windows servers in ports and can even sync between Android tablets as endpoints as they move about the vessels. For each of these platforms, Resilio is able to switch between any available communication channel reliably depending on availability.   Furthermore, the Resilio solution offers a wide array of job types, include a full Sync option that can utilize vessel to vessel communication channels to move critical data in a “store and forward” fashion from ship to ship and then to shore.  This is incredibly useful for some vessels that spend long durations away from high bandwidth communication channels but are occasionally in range of other vessels’ point to point communications.   

In all cases, we can easily push new documents or formats from the server to the endpoints, and when an employee updates a bill of lading or other documents in the field, they don’t need to do anything, the data is automatically synced back to our central office.

Incredibly Fast

Underneath this easy to use solution is technology custom-built for wide-area maritime communications.   The protocols involved are able to utilize channels at the highest possible speeds regardless of type, including point to point HF,  UHF, satellite, long-range wifi and LTE channels.   

With this powerful platform fully deployed across the entire fleet, Resilio allows our IT staff to look beyond compliance and towards the future digital transformation of transportation as the same solution can accommodate much larger data sets and be utilized to deploy more capable applications across the fleet in real-time. 

With Resilio, all data, no matter how large syncs reliably even when connectivity is poor.  Furthermore, Resilio is efficient, only moving the blocks of data that have changed to minimize usage on expensive metered connectivity.   It is the perfect platform to deploy modern digital applications at sea.

Conclusion

While our digital future is bright, compliance and safety are mission-critical today. By eliminating physical media and USB sticks, Resilio has saved man-years in lost productivity and provides the peace of mind that our data will both be accessible and secure.

Industry

Marine

“We here at Turner Sports like to try new things. If there's something new, I'm always willing to jump into the pool and try it out. Some people are stuck in their old ways and workflows. Well, there might be a better way. For us, that's Resilio.” — Brady Small, Sr. Production Engineer Sports Central Systems.
Read Customer Story
"We were able to turn around graphic proofs quicker based on our staff’s availability, versus forcing it through a bottleneck at a specific office. Resilio Platform has made us more efficient" — Ken Brubacher, Project Manager.
Read Customer Story
“Our engineers deployed a successful test version in an hour - without reading a ton of manuals - that delivered the best result of all the solutions we tried” — Roman Sakno, Enterprise Architect at Wargaming.
Read Customer Story
"Resilio Platform enables us to reliably distribute our code, specifically new language models in a fraction of time. These copy jobs now take an hour, down from eight."— Christian Bryndum, VoiceBase’s Director of Operations
Read Customer Story
“Resilio would keep Ross Maritime fully compliant and would be very easy to use for those onboard the vessels.”— Brent Nevison, IT consultant at Ross Maritime.
Read Customer Story
"If we bought about 40 additional servers it would have been pretty expensive. Resilio is a much cheaper solution for us right now." — Mario Jost, Systems Engineer @Mercedes-Benz
Read Customer Story
“Our entire situation is tremendously better, great cost savings and our data is now delivered on time.” — Jason McCune , Director of Information Technology.
Read Customer Story
“I see Resilio Platform as being absolutely pivotal to the way they work now. The media and entertainment industry is really an ideal opportunity for this technology.” — Abraham Treadwell, Tangelo CEO. (Blockhead's IT Consultants)
Read Customer Story
“For us, the main thing was fast transfer of data and obviously maintaining the integrity of all the data that we sync to our offices. And definitely the cost is very important. We were happy to find a solution where we could use our in-place architecture to keep down the cost.” — Sebastiaan Sprengers, Lead Tools Programmer @Larian Studios.
Read Customer Story
“With Resilio, you know your job has run and you can initiate scripting triggers to get feedback from clients to know if a patch is installed correctly or not” — Senior ICT Engineer (name withheld for the privacy of our customer)
Read Customer Story
"The results we get about the file transfer being completed and having no issues with the files on the other end has been fantastic. These are things I couldn’t do before using Resilio Platform.." — Jacques Vermeulen, Project Manager.
Read Customer Story
“Resilio Platform has been a game changer. It’s proven to be reliable in file transfer, It’s proven to be reliable in database replication. Overall, Resilio Platform jobs are very easy to set up and they just work!”— IT Developer at Lindblad Expeditions
Read Customer Story