The Shipping Industry, Cloud and DROOTOO

Shipping is a great example of an industry adopting cloud computing.

There are thousands of ships sailing around the world, with more than 50,000 ships in the world’s merchant fleets in 2017. Global seaborne container trade is believed to account for approximately 60 percent of all world seaborne trade, which was valued at around 12 trillion U.S. dollars in 2017. As of July 2016, the global cellular container ship fleet had the capacity to carry some 20 million standard containers. There are currently over 17 million shipping containers in the world.

 

While these numbers alone make the sector interesting, the challenges in installing, maintaining and using assets deployed on such mobile platforms while dealing with issues due to communications, connectivity, weather, legal and other factors makes it a particularly good case study for cloud computing.

This also applies to oil rigs located in the high seas. Oil companies prefer to have minimal staffing but with the ability to be aware of the real time conditions of the deployed equipment and assets.

 

Supply Chain, Logistics and Shipping

Shipping is only a part of the overall Logistics and Supply Chain operations. Comprehensive logistics packages offer sea, land, and air based solutions. Supply-chain management services include warehouse management, inventory management, processing operations like sorting, labeling, repackaging, inspection, before delivery and other customer based activities. Procedural activities like customs, forwarding, buyer consolidation, etc. are also involved before shipping can take place. The function of all these components today require development of applications primarily on mobile platform, as these operations are distributed across various ports in different geographic regions.

There are four main categories of mobile applications development approaches:

• Native Mobile Applications– Native mobile applications are written in the programming language and frameworks provided by the platform owner and running directly on the operating system of the device such as iOS and Android.
• Hybrid-Native Applications – Hybrid-native mobile applications can be written in variety of different programming languages and frameworks but are compiled into a native application running directly on the operating system of the device.
• Hybrid-Web Applications-Hybrid web mobile applications can be written using a variety of programming languages and frameworks and run within a web container on the device.
• Progressive Web Applications-Web applications are written using traditional web application programming technologies usually including some variant of Javascript, HTML5, and CSS, and are accessed initially through a browser on the device or computer.

There are two interlinked core components of a mobile application:

1) The mobile application “Front-End” that resides on the mobile device

2) The services “Back-End” that supports the mobile front-end resides on the cloud.

Using IoT and Cloud

IoT involves disparate devices working together for a common goal. These devices respond to inputs, as also web service calls, with such volume changing rapidly, depending on the use case.

• Web services and other interfaces for IoT devices can be hosted on the cloud so they can scale rapidly according to the volume of requests.

• IoT devices can generate a lot of data. By 2020, there will be tens of billions of data-spouting devices connected to the Internet.

Some examples of using IoT and cloud IT for the shipping industry:

• Connected products —giving continuous feedback about their location and performance after they are put into service in the field by using telemetry for remote monitoring.
• Connected supply chain —keeping track of inbound and outbound shipments for location related information and critical in-transit parameters such as temperature.

A cloud first approach is needed along with edge cloud (IoT) solutions to simplify the IT architecture and make it scale rapidly per market demand. To manage assets on such mobile platforms, IoT and sensor based solutions can generate data regarding various parameters of the assets. Data from various sources like ports, weather, billing, legal and compliance processes, etc. needs to be integrated. Analytics and reporting solutions including predictive analytics can be used to process all the data and flag the actions to be taken.

CHALLENGES

• Due to the large volume of data being generated by these devices, challenges in using cloud IT include:

• Information Anytime, Anywhere: IoT devices require data to be available anytime, anywhere in the cloud. Devices need to interact with each other and respond to web service calls quickly Edge devices for the shipping industry require a distributed cloud and software defined solution that is automated and high scalable.

• Lower TCO: IT resources must be purchased on-demand to meet requirements and need not be kept idle. This is very helpful when devices generate data at different volumes and times. Automated workflows must be used to simplify tasks and reduce administrative overhead.

• Security and Compliance:  Information on cloud assets needs to be available from one place and protected. Data sovereignty laws must be adhered to.  For data security and privacy, role based access must be implemented.

 

Advantage with DROOTOO’s Unified Cloud Platform

DROOTOO enables companies to improve businesses agility with a one-stop option to provision and optimize cloud IT resources.  Unlike traditional cloud management platforms, DROOTOO makes it easy for companies to deploy and scale their cloud resources on-demand depending on their role and organization type. With the large amount of data generated from connected products and supply chain for shipping, customers can now simplify their cloud environment and scale cloud operations like never before. With DROOTOO, customers can now:

Dramatically simplify their cloud environments

• SW defined 100% OPEX model
• Optimize your cloud environments by splitting workloads under different accounts in a single cloud service
• Single sign-on portal with global visibility of the cloud IT network spanning major cloud providers such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba
• Dashboard acts as your remote command center for your cloud production workloads
• All management tasks are done without scripting or programming
• Unified billing and subscription management

Empower IT to help innovate and increase agility to the business

• Accelerate new shipping and logistics servicesor optimize existing ones in minutes vs. days by aggregating cloud resources onto a single automated workflow with DROOTOO templates
• Support emerging edge IoT deployments with a distributed cloud network of over 250 datacenters, 30+ regions
• Enable multi-geo computing to meet KPIs for cost, availability, performance and disaster recovery

Achieve Cloud Governance

• Eliminate cloud lock-in by using multiple cloud vendors for distributed cloud computing
• Enforce granular control with role based access
• Multi layered security with live auditing/reporting, cloud firewalls, key pairs

 

Strategic Advantage through Closer Integration with DROOTOO

Customers are adopting DROOTOO unified cloud platform for distributed cloud operations management from one place with a simple, easy to use interface. Integrating your shipping IoT solution with the DROOTOO interface allows customers to manage their Cloud resources from the same place, and differentiates your solution from the competition.

Save Time, Money and Effort with DROOTOO as you take advantage of IoT to make business work seamlessly for future generations

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