SINGAPORE (May 28): At the Singapore Maritime Week in April this year, the government showcased the future of the maritime industry – one that envisions technology playing an instrumental role keeping Singapore’s ports relevant in face of regional competition. Minister for Trade and Industry, Chan Chun Sing, emphasised that for Singapore to truly succeed as a maritime hub, physical trade must be seen as part of a multi-faceted ecosystem that includes data, talent, technology and finance flows. The industry will need to embrace change in order to bring this dynamic, connected ecosystem to come to life.
The maritime sector’s Industry Transformation Map, which was launched in 2018, aims to grow the industry's real value-add by $4.5 billion and create over 5,000 good jobs by 2025 using automation and digitalisation.
For an industry that has struggled since oil prices crashed in 2016, digitalisation is key to restructuring the seemingly old-fashioned sector in preparation for a tech-enabled future.
However, any industry-wide digitalisation effort must address the accompanying cybersecurity risks at the same time, before they jeopardise the credibility of Singapore’s maritime sector. With Carbon Black reporting that 96% of Singapore businesses surveyed suffered a cyberattack in 2018, businesses must place cybersecurity as an urgent priority in order for Singapore to maintain its position as a top maritime city.
Robotic process automation – building blocks for the digitalised maritime sector
Robotic process automation (RPA) will be among the key pillars driving the digital transformation of the maritime industry. RPA’s emergence is due to the increased affordability of such robotic systems today coupled with the increasing shortage of low-cost human labour. It helps businesses to automate specific tasks, allowing them to increase productivity while reducing resource requirements and accruing cost savings.
These tasks include crew clearance at immigration, vessel schedules, process shipping instructions and generating shipping manifest reports. These tasks, known for being highly labour and time-intensive, can now be completed automatically and accurately, allowing manpower to be redeployed to higher-value tasks that require empathy and a human touch.
Because RPA interacts directly with an organisation’s IT infrastructure, mimicking human credentials, entitlements and business application use, it can be exploited to great effect if left unsecured. When software robots that automate and perform routine business processes across multiple computer systems are compromised by cybercriminals, any damage inflicted effectively cascades down towards all levels of operations.
When translated to the maritime sector, this means ships’ critical systems can be spied upon, or even hijacked and controlled by outsiders, leaving them vulnerable to piracy on the high seas. GPS coordinates can also be spoofed, and erroneous data transmitted to ships circumnavigating the globe. On land, port management systems can be taken over to make unauthorised edits to shipment information, creating chaos across the logistics value chain. For a port that handled 81 million twenty-foot equivalent units of containers in 2018 alone, one small incident in Singapore can inflict irreparable damage.
Keeping our ports and sailors safe – Managing RPA with security-by-design
In order to secure the industry’s future, any digitalisation effort must be implemented with security in mind from the onset. Businesses owe a basic social responsibility to their customers and the wider community to keep their private information secured. This involves identifying and patching any areas of weakness while implementing a holistic cybersecurity strategy that prioritises data security and privacy.
There are unique cybersecurity challenges that arise from extensive use of RPA in any sector and security strategies should directly address these, right from the start. This can be done by establishing discrete digital identities to distinguish between humans and software robots. With software, robots’ ability to automate and complete tasks in a fraction of the time an average human will take, any security breach can result in untold damage to the whole network. Separating the digital identities of humans from machine allows for clearer identification of any unauthorised actions that are potentially a result of malicious activity. Another important element of any cybersecurity strategy for RPA is to implement airgaps or checkpoints to ensure human oversight over processes. This enables early threat detection and damage isolation.
For an industry that has seen some tumultuous times, this latest call for digitalisation is a much-needed boost for an industry that is seeing strong competition from other regional ports like Port Klang and Tanjong Pelapas. RPA is just a part of a series of steps to digitalise the industry, and we’ll likely also see the deployment of other emerging technologies such blockchain and cognitive intelligence to further bring the maritime sector into the digital future.
As Singapore rejuvenates the maritime industry through digitalisation, we will experience more interconnected digital ecosystems and business models, and cybercrime will inevitably follow where the money goes. This means that everyone, from governments to businesses and citizens, must join hands in the fight against cybercrime, in order to realise our vision of being the leading maritime city in the world.
Leonard Cheong is a Managing Director of AdNovum Singapore, a provider of IT security software solutions, products and services for corporate companies and systems
