Overview
Visibility Throughout the Cruise Line Environments
Cruise line passenger volumes are on the rise, breaking travel records for each of the past four years. As competition remains fierce, cruise line leaders are looking to passenger digital experience to differentiate themselves. While cruise lines face several uncontrollable factors, such as poor weather while cruising or at destinations, the digital environment on ships and in corporate networks is one area they can influence.
IT teams in the cruise line industry are dedicated to delivering seamless digital experiences for passenger-facing services like trip bookings, guest mobile apps, and excursion reservations. Similarly, the performance of crew management services and maintenance schedules is equally important for operations that keep ships sailing. Issues with these services could affect revenue, cost efficiency, safety, brand reputation, and productivity. Today’s cruise line operations run on highly interconnected ecosystems, rendering the impact from disruptions immediate and far reaching. This complexity makes real-time, end-to-end observability essential to maintain service assurance and security before passengers, crews, or operations are impacted.
Trusted by industry leaders worldwide
Challenges
Managing the Complexity of Cruise Line Environments
End-to-End Visibility Gaps Impact User Experience
As cruise line network complexity explodes and digital dependency increases, gaps in end-to-end visibility from ship, to shore, to cloud, slows the troubleshooting efforts which in turn prolongs outages, ultimately, degrading digital experience and making it harder to isolate issues.
Expanded Attack Surfaces Increase Risks
On-board stores, ecommerce platforms, and payment processors increase exposure and complicate recovery. As cruise line operational systems increasingly connect to enterprise IT and hybrid / public cloud, new attack paths emerge, raising exposure and increasing operational risk.
Costly, Reactive Troubleshooting in Downtime-Intolerant Operations
Unplanned downtime creates immediate financial, operational, safety, and reputational risks for cruise lines. Maintenance system outages and communications failures can cascade into multi-hour outages that impact passengers, crew, and staff.
Uptime, Security Threats, and Operational Resilience
Sophisticated ransomware and DDoS attacks target cruise line environments, disrupting reservations, crew operations, and maintenance services, making operational resilience essential to protecting user experience and business continuity.
Costly Data Silos and Fragmented Observability
When telemetry is siloed across operations and security teams, investigations slow and resolution times stretch. This fragmentation drives higher data retention costs while leaving gaps in visibility across network locations and critical application services.
Key Stakeholders
Passengers, Staff, and Crews
NETSCOUT assures end-to-end service delivery across even the most complex application environments – from ship, to shore, to cloud – to ensure that cruise lines and luxury resorts can stay up and running 24 by 7. This includes communications with mobile apps, websites, call centers, private or public cloud.
Outcomes That Matter
Industry-Leading Network Intelligence for Cruise Line Environments
Assure Cruise Line Applications
NETSCOUT supports a wide range of applications, including business critical cruise line applications such as reservations, shipboard property management systems (SPMS), and payment authorization. Real-time, observability for NETSCOUT Smart Data helps IT quickly pinpoint and resolve application-specific issues across the multi-vendor ecosystem.
Reduce Cyber Risks in Cruise Line Corporate Environments and Ship Networks
Rapid detection and response with NETSCOUT reduces the risk and impact of DDoS attacks and suspicious activity such as lateral movement and data exfiltration. This helps prevent operational disruption in corporate infrastructure as well as on ships to minimize financial exposure and potential regulatory fines.
Dramatically Lower MTTK and MTTR
Proactive monitoring pinpoints issues and their root cause quickly, giving IT actionable insight. This dramatically lowers mean time to knowledge (MTTK) and mean time to resolve (MTTR), restoring performance for passengers, crew, and staff.
Operationalize Zero Trust to Reduce Cyber Risk
Deep packet inspection (DPI) and Smart Data reveal anomalous activity across interconnected services, including AI-driven traffic, helping contain threats earlier.
Protect and Extend the Value of Existing and Future Investments
Future-proof capital investments in AI, IoT, automation, and robotics and optimize ROI with observability and security solutions that meet today’s operational needs and scale for tomorrow’s growth.
Use Cases
Operational Excellence for Cruise Lines
Cruise line operators depend on understanding their network environments, service behavior, and emerging risks to support seamless experiences that delight their customers.
What Our Customers Are Saying
"The visibility it provides into our infrastructure and application performance is invaluable, offering a great insight that bolsters our monitoring capabilities. Moreover, the troubleshooting and resolution of complex issues are expedited with this tool, which not only improves our system operations rapidly but also enhances customer experience by reducing downtime."
- Nirmal K. | Read full review on G2
Resources
NETSCOUT Solutions Provide Visibility at Remote Sites, Co-Los, Data Centers, and Beyond
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FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions
What cruise line applications should be part of proactive observability strategies?
Comprehensive monitoring and analysis, leveraging a network vantage point, provides critical insights into virtually all cruise line application activity, service dependencies, and the underlying network, including connectivity and traffic paths that impact performance, latency, errors, packet loss and much more. This is critically important for applications used in every area of cruise line operations, including trip reservations and bookings, shipboard property management (SPMS), food and beverage POS, reservation systems for dining, spa, and shore excursions, and guest mobile apps.
How does NETSCOUT support Zero Trust and security in cruise line operations?
Security and Zero Trust initiatives are powered by NETSCOUT’s Omnis Cybersecurity solutions, including Omnis Cyber Intelligence and Omnis CyberStream, which provide packet-level insights for validating network segmentation, monitoring policy enforcement, and investigating suspicious activity. It gives cruise line organizations insights into real-time network behavior to identify lateral movement, exfiltration of confidential data, and control gaps across hybrid environments.
How Can NETSCOUT help with user experience and performance issues throughout cruise line corporate network and on-board using the ships’ networks?
NETSCOUT supports observability in any infrastructure, for any location, including what would be viewed as a remote location for cruise lines – on-board ships. The IT team can assure performance and security from ship, to shore, to cloud. NETSCOUT’s solutions for observability deliver proactive monitoring for Smart Data from deep packet inspection (DPI) that enables IT organizations to move beyond reactive troubleshooting into more predictive and preventative postures, which is critical to the success of cruise lines and their passengers’ journey.
How does NETSCOUT protect the availability of cruise line corporate networks?
NETSCOUT’s Arbor DDoS protection solution provides cruise line organizations with multilayer DDoS protection that stops attacks at the edge, scales in the cloud, and adapts in real time. By combining always-on, on-premises mitigation with cloud-scale capacity and AI-driven intelligence, NETSCOUT protects critical application and network services from all attack types and sizes.
How does NETSCOUT performance analysis of cruise line applications differ from competitors’ tools?
NETSCOUT’s patented ASI technology, or Smart Data, delivers AI-ready, IP intelligence and metadata derived from packets. It natively supports over a thousand applications “out of the box,” including cruise line applications used for both operations and travelers. Flexible configuration options are available to support custom applications. NETSCOUT is the only solution to provide such flexibility.
