Deploying a Maritime Cloud

The maritime domain plays a decisive role in the modern worldwide digital economy and collaborative environments. In addition, emerging technologies such as cloud computing provide holistic frameworks for generating and delivering a plethora of interoperable, cost-effective, and scalable e-services that efficiently manage information and data stored inside large-scale datacenters. Driven by this motivation, this article presents a perspective beyond traditional IT utilization over the maritime domain: a roadmap to the Maritime Cloud. The authors define the Maritime Cloud stack and architecture in detail and describe the Maritime Cloud delivery and deployment models as an integral process for transitioning to the Maritime Cloud. The authors evaluate advantages and challenges and present future research directions.