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Situation 01 · Vessel handover

You've just bought a vessel

A vessel changes hands with a survey of the hull and machinery. Almost nobody surveys the IT. Then the old crew leaves, and with them go the admin passwords, the licence keys, the vendor relationships and everything that was never written down.

What goes wrong

The hard deadline is delivery. Everything after that is discovery.

  • Admin credentials for switches, firewalls, servers and the PBX turn out to live in one person’s head — and that person works for the seller.
  • Software licences (PMS, navigation, charting, media) were bought in the previous operator’s name and aren’t transferable, or nobody knows.
  • The connectivity contract has eighteen months to run, with an auto-renew clause and a termination fee.
  • Remote access is still open to the old management company, the old integrator and a supplier nobody remembers appointing.
  • The backup exists, but restoring it has never been tried.

None of this shows up in a standard pre-purchase survey.

What we do

We run the IT side of the handover as your representative, in parallel with the technical handover you’re already doing.

  1. Inventory. Every computer-based system on board: what it is, where it is, what firmware it runs, what it’s connected to. This is the same inventory class now expects for cyber compliance, so it’s not thrown away afterwards.
  2. Control. Credentials rotated and handed to you, not to us. Old remote access closed. Ownership of licences, domains, cloud tenants and vendor accounts transferred or re-purchased with eyes open.
  3. Contracts. What you’ve inherited, what it costs, when it can be exited, and what you’d be paying if you’d negotiated it yourself.
  4. The list you’d actually want. What’s fine, what’s going to fail, what’s over-specified, and what to do in the first ninety days. Prioritised, priced roughly, with no hardware to sell you.

Who this is for

New owners, family offices and management companies taking over a vessel — from a 30-metre yacht to a small expedition ship. Brokers who want the sale to close without an IT surprise.

Timing

Ideally before the sale completes, so the questions get asked while the seller still has to answer them. We’ve also done it after, which is slower and more expensive. Either works.