Digital Ship’s Autumn 2026 Data & IT Infrastructure Journal examines how shipowners can build digital systems that work across vessels, shore teams and mixed fleets. The issue puts data quality, interoperability and hybrid computing at the heart of repeatable maritime digitalisation.
Digital Ship has launched its latest journal, Data & IT Infrastructure, with a focus on one of the less visible parts of fleet digitalisation: whether the underlying technology can support growth across ships and shore operations.
Written by Clarissa Wright, the Autumn 2026 issue examines maritime IT architecture, data quality, system integration, cloud and edge computing, resilience, governance and digital culture. Its editorial focus asks how shipowners can deploy digital tools across fleets that often combine new vessels with systems that have been in service for decades.
One figure captures the appetite for better ship-to-shore integration. The journal cites Thetius-Marlink research showing that 91.5% of surveyed industry operators would roll out the same modern workspace tools used ashore on vessels, if onboard barriers such as legacy integration could be addressed.
That gap between what shore teams can use and what can reliably run at sea runs through several sections of the journal. The report examines APIs, middleware and open architectures alongside hybrid edge-cloud systems that allow critical workloads to remain onboard while less time-sensitive data can be synchronised with the cloud.
Captain Aswath Bharadwaj, Marine and HSSEQ Superintendent at V.Group, describes the operational case for that architecture: “Hybrid edge-cloud makes sense because the Master needs real-time decision support onboard without waiting on a shore round trip, while shore teams need the cloud side for fleet-wide trend analysis and audit trails.”
The journal also looks at the data foundations needed before AI can be applied across a fleet. Bharadwaj says: “AI tools amplify whatever data discipline already exists on a fleet. If the underlying data is inconsistent or poorly owned, AI just makes wrong conclusions faster and with more confidence.”
The wider message is that fleet digitalisation cannot be treated as a series of disconnected software purchases. Shipowners need systems that can communicate, preserve data quality and keep critical operations running when connectivity or individual systems fail.
The journal closes by examining what scalable maritime infrastructure could look like over the next three to five years, including the foundations required for AI, automation and advanced analytics.
Download and read the journal: The Digital Ship Data and IT Infrastructure journal.
