National Sea Rescue Institute

We already operate Office 365 across the entire institute and most of our data and solutions reside in the Cloud. NAV and SafeTRX currently operate off our servers behind the Vodacom Firewall. The licenses of our servers expire within three years and the proposal is to shift our systems into the Cloud with Microsoft Dynamics. The head office hardware has been refreshed and the next phase is to refresh station hardware. The next major project will be the conversion of our Management Information System (MIS) into a new location and incident-based recording system, which will link in with the introduction of our new Emergency Operations Centre. This development will ensure our operational data is effectively and timeously captured, ensuring better management reporting and tracking of strategically important information. In addition to all these projects in progress, the ongoing tasks of ensuring base connectivity and software ease of use will continue. The major game changer for NSRI will be the call centre take-on, merging their very large data set into one streamlined system. Connectivity to the internet at station level surprisingly is a challenge, but we are working with Vodacom to fill the gaps. There are currently 12 stations that have secure connections and we need to evolve that to all 41. Our internal ICT capacity is stretched given the complexity and speed of development and maintenance requirements and we propose that we appoint another ICT Technician in 2019. The Internet of Things is an evolving technology and we are investigating how it would augment our operational capacity and improve efficiency. We have engaged with Vox Telecom in respect of their SigFox solution and will investigate its application within our station environment to monitor and report against functions/assets.