As primary technical lead, we designed and built the complete onboard IT platform for a privately owned sailing yacht, bringing identity security and network segmentation normally seen in corporate headquarters to life at sea, and supporting it ever since.
We designed and built the complete onboard network, with a segmented VLAN architecture separating guest, crew, navigation and IoT / camera traffic. The whole platform runs on a full UniFi ecosystem of gateway, switches and access points, engineered for the hull and its operation.
Interior and deck WiFi was engineered for complete coverage, including an exterior access point mounted on the mast to extend connectivity across the full deck, with strong signal wherever owner, guests and crew actually are.
WiFi is protected by certificate-based EAP-TLS authentication, backed by an on-board RADIUS / AD / NPS / ADCS stack. This is the identity model used to protect corporate headquarters, rarely seen on a yacht, and it ensures only trusted, known devices can ever connect.
Radar and bridge electronics are segmented onto a dedicated navigation VLAN, so navigation traffic never competes or interferes with the rest of the network, and cameras and IoT devices sit on their own contained segment.
Starlink provides primary connectivity with automatic failover and outage diagnostics for uninterrupted internet. On the cloud side, we secured the yacht's Microsoft 365 tenant, and successfully responded to a business email compromise (BEC) attack, containing it and hardening the tenant against recurrence.
TODO: owner / captain testimonial. Placeholder: “It is the first time the technology aboard has simply faded into the background. Everything works, and we never think about it.”
Captain · SY Shagala Bagala (pending approval)
Out of respect for owner privacy, this case study is deliberately free of sensitive detail. The vessel name can be anonymised on request.