Accelerating Sustainability in the Shipping Industry on AWS with ZeroNorth

Headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, ZeroNorth is a technology company with a mission to make global shipping more sustainable. Its software solution integrates services for chartering, voyaging, maintaining, and bunkering to help companies in the shipping industry reduce their operating costs and lower their greenhouse gas emissions.

The shipping industry is a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for 3 percent of the world’s total. By 2030, emissions are projected to rise by almost 11 percent compared with levels in 2010. This statistic underscores the urgency for the shipping industry, one of the most energy-intensive sectors, to prioritize sustainable practices more than ever before.

With over 20 different legacy systems and communication methods used throughout the shipping industry, finding ways to improve efficiency and sustainability can be difficult. Because these systems are so complex and are not integrated, shipping companies often grapple with siloed information and miss opportunities for optimization.

Before ZeroNorth migrated to AWS, it hosted its solution on a different cloud provider—but soon, the need for a technology upgrade became evident. The company urgently needed to unite siloed data, connect disparate sources, and automate manual processes. After a thorough evaluation, ZeroNorth saw an opportunity to modernize some of its software components on AWS.

With agile cloud solutions from AWS, ZeroNorth could create a unified environment that could merge legacy systems and speed up the deployment of digital services. Moreover, ZeroNorth found solutions to several internal challenges on AWS, including issues related to single-tenant architecture and a previously existing gap in control policies, data management procedures, and orchestration workflows.

Data is at the core of ZeroNorth’s mission; every data point can help drive critical sustainability decisions and optimize operations. On AWS, the company can integrate multiple sources and make organizational data available to shipping companies. To manage this data, it has adopted Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)—an object storage service built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere—and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud. On Amazon S3, data is securely stored and readily accessible, while Amazon RDS helps organize this information so that shipping companies can extract actionable insights.

With serverless technologies such as AWS Fargate, a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine, and AWS Lambda, an event-driven compute service, ZeroNorth can run its software without having to manage every component of its infrastructure. These solutions, combined with containers running on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed Kubernetes service, empower the company to scale its digital services efficiently, even as demand grows. In fact, ZeroNorth has introduced five new services in one year and increased the adoption of its solution from a few hundred vessels to over 4,000.

On AWS, ZeroNorth developers can rapidly test and iterate new solutions, accelerating the company’s speed of innovation. The cloud-based infrastructure makes it simple for the company to explore new tools, fail fast, and learn quickly using machine learning and AWS analytics. As a result, ZeroNorth can scale its business and get new services out to market at a much faster pace.

For ZeroNorth, these benefits go far beyond business growth. By using AWS to digitize fleet operations, the company is providing the shipping industry with better data access and visibility. With these insights, organizations can make decisions to optimize their operations, leading to lower fuel consumption and, in turn, reduced emissions. ZeroNorth’s approach makes it possible for stakeholders to engage in effective decarbonization initiatives and meet the urgent call to action posed by climate change.