Dryad: Maritime Security & Risk Intelligence Portal

Background

Dryad Global provides maritime security intelligence to ship operators, fleet managers, and Company Security Officers. They needed a purpose-built portal to surface real-time incident data, risk zones, and vessel-level intelligence in a single interface. Before this, a CSO responsible for a fleet's safety had to piece together incident reports, piracy indices, and vessel positions from separate sources to make a routing decision, which is exactly the kind of decision that needs to be made quickly and with confidence.

What We Built

A Node.js API and Angular SPA backed by MongoDB. The map interface (Leaflet) renders geohash-based risk zones with colour-coded threat levels, so a CSO can see at a glance which waters are getting riskier. CSOs can drill into incidents, view vessel associations, and export risk assessments. Key modules:

Risk map

geohash grid with real-time threat zone colouring based on incident density and severity

Incidents

structured incident records (type, severity, location, vessels involved, timeline)

WPI data

Western Piracy Index feed integrated and surfaced alongside incident views

Search

cross-entity search across incidents, vessels, and threat zones

Files

document management for intelligence reports and advisories

Admin

user management, TRA (threat and risk assessment) authoring

Architecture

Dual-server Node.js setup separating the API from the ETL data-maintenance pipeline, so a slow or failing feed import never affects the live portal. Auth0 handles identity. MongoDB stores all entity data. Docker Compose covers local development and production deployment, with a separate trainer data pipeline for onboarding demo/test datasets.

Results

Outcomes & Lessons Learned

• Geohash-based risk scoring enabling real-time threat zone visualisation on interactive maps
• Incident tracking with structured severity, location, and vessel association data
• WPI (Western Piracy Index) feed integration surfacing threat intelligence in context
• CSO-focused admin portal with role-based access and full audit trail
• ETL pipeline for ingesting and normalising external maritime threat feeds

The geohash-based risk scoring approach allowed the risk map to update incrementally as new incidents were ingested, without recalculating the entire grid. This made the live feed performant even at global scale, where a full recompute on every update would have made the map feel sluggish exactly when a CSO needed it most.