As of July 20, 2018, tugboat and towboat operators must comply with new Coast Guard regulations designed to improve safety. Published in the Code of Federal Regulations at 46 CFR Subchapter M, the rules require that towing vessel operators submit to an annual Coast Guard inspection or implement an approved towing safety management system (TSMS). Many operators are deploying onboard vessel management systems to help meet these requirements, but are struggling to maintain the real-time data communications needed to make the management systems work properly and ensure compliance.

In our last post [Software-Defined WAN: Cheaper, Faster, More Secure], we discussed how software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) solutions enable you to reduce WAN cost and complexity while increasing performance, reliability and security. The software-defined component of SD-WAN lies in a smart centralized controller capable of differentiating and segmenting traffic and making routing decisions on the fly. 

Changing traffic patterns and bandwidth requirements are forcing organizations to rethink their WAN architectures and data transport options. In the past, most applications and resources were hosted in the corporate data center, and branch locations connected to headquarters in a hub-and-spoke architecture. Today, the WAN primarily supports Internet traffic and cloud access, making traditional designs costly and inefficient.

The IT industry is often guilty of hype and oversimplification. New technologies are marketed in a way that creates overinflated expectations, while the potential challenges associated with implementing and managing the technology are minimized. Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) technology has, for the most part, lived up to the hype.