If you asked 100 trawlermen what the most important factor was in whether they were going to have a successful day at sea, the chances are that most of them wouldn’t say it was their vessel, their equipment or their crewmates, but would instead point towards what was stored inside their heads.
The knowledge accumulated by fishermen during many expeditions over many years, and often over many generations, about different coastal location, the tides, the weather conditions, the different seasons, the species that they’re after and the price they’ll receive for their catch have a huge influence on how, when and where they cast their nets.
Guarding this information carefully has always been crucial in stopping competitors taking advantage of the opportunities that you’ve learned are out there – but in a world where, by law, vessels have to let the authorities know where they are at all times, it’s getting harder and harder to maintain this level of confidentiality.
Data security was a key consideration in the design of our SC2 Gen 2 Inshore Vessel Monitoring System (I-VMS), which late last year became one of only four devices to successfully complete the Marine Management Organisation’s extensive accreditation process for technologies that could be used to monitor the location of fishing boats within the UK’s coastal waters.
We recognised the wider importance of data security to operators in the offshore fishing industry and, as the only technology provider in this market with the industry-leading ISO 27001 information security management system (ISMS) accreditation, benchmarked our work in this area to the same level required by our clients in the military sector.
Our system provides an easy-to-use, secure, cloud-based monitoring platform that is accessible from tablets, desktop computers or a smart phone app via satellite and Bluetooth, and also includes free cloud-based monitoring software delivered by a bespoke platform that we developed ourselves which enables users to historically see all their fishing tracking data in graphical form.
The SC2 Gen 2 is the only one of the accredited devices that is fully integrated into the Marine Management Organisation’s Government Gateway software, while all data sent to the MMO is fully encrypted to the highest AES-256 accreditation standards.
Unlike our overseas competitors, we also only use UK-based data centres for storing the information that customers can access through a unique login process about the locations that they’ve visited, while we have been successfully sending secure vessel data to the MMO since 2016.
All of these measures mean that our customers know where their data is stored, that it is stored securely and that the details it contains about their operations are fully safeguarded.
In an age where knowledge is more powerful than ever before, data security has to be an essential consideration for anyone in the fishing industry that wants to be sure that the knowledge on which their commercial success is based is stored as safely as possible.
For more information on the SC2 Gen 2 Inshore Vessel Monitoring System, please contact Harry Cook at Succorfish on 0191 447 6883 or via harry@succorfish.com
