The Shipyard — The One You Must Walk Closest Beside
The Shipyard — The One You Must Walk Closest Beside
One you must walk with to the very end, from a seat that holds no command of your own.
- LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/abysstoinfinity/
Ask people what the hardest part of a newbuilding cybersecurity project is, and most reach for the technical: the design of zones and conduits, the OT DMZ architecture, IP range allocation, the interpretation of IEC 62443 and IACS UR E26/E27. None of it is easy — and so it is tempting to cling to the letter of the regulation.
But after living through the work itself, my conclusion is a different one. The specification is clear. There is room for interpretation, yet the rules already exist. The real difficulty lies elsewhere: turning those promises — written plainly across the documents — into an actual ship, by moving a counterpart over whom I hold no command, and whose face I have often never seen.
This is the crux. The role of owner's-side advisor is, perhaps more than any other, the one most easily accused of playing the fox that borrows the tiger's ferocity — claiming an authority that is not its own. I cannot direct the shipyard, nor can I evaluate them. Before the person who holds the decision, I have no title, no rank, no shared history to lean on. And yet the work must get done. So this is not an essay about authority. It is about how someone without authority persuades — and moves, together — an unfamiliar counterpart they must walk beside to the very end.
The Shipyard Is the Most Precious Partner
Let me be clear about one thing first. In all of this, the hands that actually build the ship belong to the shipyard. No zone diagram I have ever drawn, no specification however meticulous, becomes a single vessel without passing through their hands. That is why the shipyard is the most precious partner I have — the one I must persuade, and walk with, to the end. Lose this starting point, and everything else falls out of line. Every comment they offer begins from the simplest and most important premise of all: Can the ship be completed on time and delivered to the owner without trouble?
To be a good partner, I first have to understand the world they work in. There are sound reasons — their own — why cybersecurity is sometimes pushed to the back.
① The pressure of cost and schedule
Cybersecurity shares the finite resource of time with steel, with the delivery date, with hundreds of other priorities. For the person responsible for getting a ship afloat right now, it is no small task to make them grasp the weight of something invisible — something that, for the past several decades, had nothing to do with how ships were built.
② The problem of domain
Cybersecurity sits at the seam of IT, OT, and systems integration — an unfamiliar territory that even decades of honed shipbuilding engineering cannot grasp in a single stroke. For those who have only ever seen the finished result of a ship properly built and running, a proposal to open technical discussion on the premise that "there is no such thing as 100% complete cybersecurity" may be hard to accept from the very first line.
③ Trust in proven methods
Behind the words "this is how we have always built ships" lie pride and a track record of building safe vessels over long years. To grow cautious before a proposal to swap a proven method for a single new regulation is, more often than not, an expression of responsibility rather than its absence. Add to this that an industry as vast as shipbuilding entangles countless stakeholders, and that there is no shortage of people who approach it with the impure motive of personal advancement. To expect trust from the outset — walking into such a world holding the unfamiliar business card of "cybersecurity" — is simply untenable.
Holding the same contract clause, carrying the same opinion from the owner, I must still set out the path we need to take while listening to their judgment as shipbuilding experts. The reason is simple. A newbuilding project runs for years. Whether they become true partners in it rests entirely on the attitude of someone — me — who has only just entered the industry. To get the work done on the foothold of the voice they have ceded, bit by bit, while planting in that same ground the seed of a relationship. The stranger who came into shipbuilding under the unfamiliar name of "cybersecurity" must become, little by little, someone who gets through without ever having to play a heavy card.
The Moment You Mistake It for Your Own — You Are Nothing
There is a most dangerous trap. It is to mistake the voice over the vessel — ceded out of consideration by the owner, the shipyard, the suppliers — as a power that was mine from the start. Through IACS UR E26, cybersecurity has become an essential requirement for a ship to set sail. But it is not the most important element in the ship's actual function. Without it, the ship will still move; the industrial functions built up over the past decades will still operate. Given that UR E26 is still in its early stage, the voice they have graciously ceded is better read another way — as a high-difficulty test of whether this person can become one of the family.
I am no more than a channel of communication for a single subject — "cybersecurity" — among the countless themes bound up in building a ship. The work does not get done because I am right, or because I am impressive. The structure is right, and I am merely speaking on its behalf for a moment. To earn trust on this fact — that alone is the only path to being recognized as one of the trade inside the vast industry of shipbuilding.
At some point I realized it: a project that fits cybersecurity onto a vessel is, in the end, a game of reading structure. A game of finding where the problem actually lies, and resolving it precisely and with grace. And at the close of a well-finished project, what remains is the most powerful title of all — someone the work can be trusted to.
The three bodies never align perfectly. Just as the three-body problem has no closed-form solution. And yet even the smallest mass can trace a stable orbit — when it reads the gravitational field the heavier bodies have already laid down, and borrows that gravity to give a single push at the right moment.
The road from the abyss to the infinite rests, in the end, upon this stubborn, repeated work of attunement.
A maritime cybersecurity and compliance specialist across the ship design & build lifecycle, focused on cybersecurity architecture, governance, and regulatory conformity for the shipbuilding and offshore sectors.
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