Athens-based Primebulk Shipmanagement has begun the roll-out of the Quazar platform from Navarino across its fleet of nine ships, to be used to manage the onboard IT infrastructure for the vessels under an ‘IT-as-a-service’ arrangement.
The package includes all onboard hardware and software for the service combined with a personal Navarino IT manager to manage support requests, for a fixed monthly fee per vessel that covers hardware leasing, software licensing, and support fees.
Quazar will also be used to implement and control security policies across the fleet to safeguard the digital infrastructure and any connected devices, to make the systems more robust against cyber-attacks while complying with regulations.
“The number one reason we chose Quazar is the cyber security of our vessels which we take very seriously. Before, we had of course things like group policies on the servers and antivirus but not a complete solution. Quazar has really helped us to ensure a complete, secure setup across the fleet,” said Dimitris Zografos, IT Manager at Primebulk.
“Navarino’s Quazar team has also begun preparing for us the documentation needed for the IMO cyber requirements – this is a demanding task that would have been extremely difficult to prepare ourselves. It is a huge help for us to have the Quazar team do this for us, creating tailor-made documentation, so that we just need to read through, amend it slightly if needed and approve it, rather than doing the whole task ourselves from scratch.”
“The second reason we are installing Quazar is time – it saves us a lot of it. By handing over most of the day-to-day support, equipment preparation and management of our vessels’ IT infrastructure to our personal Navarino IT manager we free up a tremendous amount of our resources internally to focus on other things. I no longer need to attend to minor support issues on our vessels, for example if the Wi-Fi is not working, or a printer is not working, with Quazar such support is taken care of by Navarino, not by me.”
Primebulk will move from its previous single server setup – a potential single source of failure – to a fully redundant infrastructure with remote desktop access once implementation is complete.
Configuration of the onboard systems can be accessed from shore via the Navarino Infinity portal, allowing the IT department to make changes as required. For more involved changes requests can be directed to Navarino.
“For example, the other day a vessel requested the installation of some new Wi-Fi access points, which I approved and then it was smoothly implemented by Navarino,” added Mr Zografos.
“So Quazar not only saves me time, but it also is fully overseen and controlled by us, giving us the peace of mind that comes from knowing all our vessels’ IT networks are fully supported and maintained and in exactly the way we want them to be.”
