The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) plays a major role in protecting the lives of seafarers off the coast of Britain, rescuing 21 people a day. So when it comes to the IT infrastructure that supports operations, the RNLI could be forgiven for being ultra-cautious. Nevertheless, that has not prevented it from planning a major move to cloud computing.

At Microsoft’s UK launch event for its Azure services platform, bespoke application vendor Active Web Solutions (AWS) outlined how the RNLI plans to migrate its MOB [man overboard] Guardian system to Microsoft's Azure platform.

The RNLI has more than 300 lifeboats, with a relief fleet of about 100 boats, and last year these boats and their crews rescued about 8,000 people.

The MOB Guardian system uses a satellite-enabled base station fitted to fishing vessels, along with Bluetooth-enabled personal safety devices (PSD) worn by the fishermen.

The MOB Guardian-equipped vessels automatically issue hourly reports to the RNLI's headquarters from the base stations via satellite. The reports include the fishing boat's GPS position, heading and speed. If contact is lost, an alert is generated and if contact cannot be re-established or the vessel confirmed as 'safe', the Coastguard takes appropriate action.

For individual fishermen, the PSD generates an alert if the Bluetooth connection to the base station is severed.

MOB Guardian provides assurance over every vessel that is equipped with the system, says RNLI operations manager Peter Bradley. In the event of an emergency “we’d know the name of the ship and the name of the man overboard," he adds.

Currently, the MOB Guardian service runs over RNLI infrastructure hosted by AWS. But the system will move to Microsoft's cloud computing platform, Azure, starting in November.

The RNLI has only been running MOB Guardian for a year and says it is still at an early stage in its deployment. “I know a year sounds like a long time, but with a piece of marine equipment that isn’t a long time,” says Bradley.

The move to Azure will enable RNLI to scale the system to previously unimaginable levels, says Bradley.

"We can expand, and also sell on services to potential users of MOB Guardian with a scalability that we couldn’t dream of before. With our current infrastructure the costs to do that would be absolutely horrendous. Making the services available through the cloud would be so much easier and cost effective,” he says.

Nevertheless, the RNLI requires cast-iron guarantees on service levels, before migrating to the cloud. However, those risks need to be understood within the context of the risks it faces using its current IT set-up, argues Bradley.

“We already have the existing system reliant on broadband internet connections and the GUI is presented via Microsoft applications,” he says.

“It would be fair to say that before any shift to cloud services were undertaken we would need to have resilience thoroughly tested just as we did prior to going live on the existing system,” he adds.