Enabling access to Voyage Estimator on your phone

Many of our customers are hosting the Voyage Management System (VMS) on their own servers behind a firewall, these are either managed and maintained by their own IT department or an external service provider. 

When users want access to their voyage calculations and other features on their phones or outside of the internal network, the systems must be made available from the internet.

How this is done is up to the network administrators, typically the IT department or the external service provider controlling and maintaining the infrastructure.

When doing so, there are some aspects we recommend considering, to ensure that the systems are secured. 

Setting up network encryption (SSL)

In case your company does not have an SSL certificate already, Dataloy can assist in setting this up with a "Let's Encrypt" certificate with frequent automatic renewal on a consultancy basis.  

We recommend customers that have access to the system through the Internet to use network encryption.

Ensuring password routines are enforcing high quality passwords. 

Often we see that the password quality of a system behind a firewall is questionable. Users often have poor passwords that are easy to guess, or brute force. 

There are several measures in the system that can help Administrators set up the system to enforce security when it comes to passwords.

  • Mechanisms to ensure that the complexity of the password is high.  (Password Complexity: Case sensitivity and prohibit inclusion of the username in the password)
  • Ensure that it is not possible to reuse old passwords (Password History)
  • Ensure that passwords are long enough (Password Length)
  • Ensure that the users are enforced to change their passwords after a configurable time. (Password Age) 

Press here to read more, and learn how to configure these features. 

Making the system available on the internet

How this is done varies a lot from network to network, but for the system to work on your mobile (without using VPN) it must be made available at port 443 (HTTPS) on an external IP/address in your network. 

This must be done by the network administrator (IT department, or external service provider) unless you have the VMS hosted by Dataloy. 

Note: Two phase authentication is currently not supported, if your company has this as a requirement, you can not utilise the mobile voyage estimator.