Today, Amazon Web Services – partner of Information Age’s Women in IT Awards London – has announced that Samsung Heavy Industries selected it as the preferred cloud provider to support its digital transformation.

Smart shipping

Samsung Heavy Industries is turning to AWS’s expansive infrastructure and scalability to gain competitive advantage in the smart shipping industry.

AWS will handle the infrastructure, so that the Samsung Heavy Industries team can innovate on its new autonomous shipping platform, a system that enables self-piloting of large container ships, LNG carriers and floating production systems. Land transport is not the only form experimenting with automation.

>Read more on how blockchain technology will revolutionise logistics in the maritime industry

The shipping giant will continue to expand its smart shipping capabilities using the expanding range of AWS’s services, which includes machine learning, augmented reality and virtual reality, analytics, databases, compute and storage.

For example, Samsung Heavy Industries will use AWS to build a big data analytics ship navigation system using Amazon Redshift, which improves after-market customer service for ship owners; while machine learning services, including Amazon Polly and Amazon Lex, will provide real-time alerts to its customers about the condition of their ships, and will use Amazon Sumerian to create a virtual replica of the ship cockpit for land-based training and simulations.

“We’re digitising our shipping fleet by using the most advanced technologies in the world to enhance our approaches to shipbuilding, operations, and delivery, and chose AWS as our preferred cloud provider to help us quickly transform Samsung Heavy Industries’ into a cloud-first maritime business,” said Dongyeon Lee, Director of Ship & Offshore Performance Research Center at Samsung Heavy Industries.

>Read more on the key to an autonomous future

“By leveraging AWS, we’ve successfully released several smart shipping systems so that our customers can manage their ships and fleets more efficiently, and we continue to test new capabilities for ocean-bound vessel navigation and automation. AWS delivers a highly flexible environment, with the broadest and deepest portfolio of cloud services, that is ideal for accelerating research and development across the company, and it has enabled our developers and data scientists to bring new ideas to market at an unprecedented pace.”

Variety of services

Samsung Heavy Industries’ next-generation smart shipping systems on AWS will leverage a wide variety of the cloud provider’s services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Solution (Amazon S3), AWS Key Management Service (KMS) and AWS CloudTrail to create integrated systems for all vessel-related data collected from land to sea.

Security…always

By using AWS, Samsung Heavy Industries was also able to build an information security management system to respond to cyber threats and is able to provide a highly scalable, secure environment for smart ship technology development. In turn, it is the first Korean smart ship maker to meet compliance requirements of the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS).

>Read more on 10 tips for securing AWS public cloud environments

“We’re excited to be fueling Samsung Heavy Industries’ digital transformation, providing them with the services and expertise to rapidly innovate on behalf of their maritime customers and establish a cloud-first strategy on AWS, said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. “Their autonomous and smart shipping systems built on AWS will not only enhance their competitive edge, but also bring significant advances to the worldwide shipping industry. We look forward to continuing to support Samsung Heavy Industries on their journey with AWS.”

Nominations are now open for the Women in IT Awards Ireland and Women in IT Awards Silicon Valley. Nominate yourself, a colleague or someone in your network now! The Women in IT Awards Series – organised by Information Age – aims to tackle this issue and redress the gender imbalance, by showcasing the achievements of women in the sector and identifying new role models