Industries / Port of Houston

Port of Houston & Maritime Logistics IT

TWIC®-credentialed managed IT for terminal operators, stevedores, customs brokers, freight forwarders, and maritime services along the Houston Ship Channel.

The industry

The Port of Houston is the busiest U.S. port by foreign waterborne tonnage and the second-largest by total tonnage — more than 275 million short tons move through the Houston Ship Channel annually. Terminals, stevedores, customs brokers, freight forwarders, drayage companies, tank-cleaning shops, and marine-services firms run inside one of the most access-controlled industrial footprints in the country. The IT that supports them has to move at port speed, survive MARSEC-level changes, and satisfy the Coast Guard, CBP, and the Maritime Transportation Security Act without slowing the gate.

Why Mako fits

Every Mako engineer holds a Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC®). That's the TSA-level background check MTSA-regulated facilities require for contractor access. It means when your WMS goes down at 3 a.m. during a vessel discharge, our engineer is already cleared to be sponsored onto the terminal — not waiting weeks for first-time vetting. Combined with 25 years of Houston-metro operating history and a Tier III data center we work inside of every day, Mako is built for the way the Port actually operates.

What breaks

Common problems for port of houston businesses.

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TWIC®-gated site access — every contractor touching a secure area needs the credential before badging starts; vetting a new MSP from zero can take weeks
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24/7 / 24/6 gate and terminal operations — the shift that breaks at 2 a.m. during a vessel discharge can't wait for a 9-to-5 help desk
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CBP ACE, AES, and Customs-broker filings with deadline windows that missed filings compound into demurrage and per-diem fees
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WMS / TMS / terminal-operating-system reliability during vessel peaks, turn times, and rail-handoff bottlenecks
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EDI integrations — 204/210/214/856/990 with shipping lines, brokers, consignees, rail carriers — that fail silently at the worst possible moment
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MARSEC Level changes that shift access rules mid-shift and require documented compliance
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Shared-use equipment, shift-handover data integrity, and badged-crew rotations across stevedoring and drayage operations
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Cyber-insurance applications sized for maritime-logistics risk (ransomware, BEC, cargo-manifest tampering)

Built for port of houston

Services tuned to how you actually work.

TWIC®-credentialed engineers — every one of them

Transportation Worker Identification Credentials are held by 100% of Mako's engineering staff. When your terminal sponsors us, we pass the federal background check portion on day one. That's the difference between being on-site tomorrow and being on-site next month.

After-hours and overnight coverage

Vessel operations and gate shifts don't respect business hours. We staff escalation so your operations shift gets a real engineer, not a voicemail, when the system goes sideways at 3 a.m.

WMS / TMS / TOS reliability work

We support the major terminal-operating and transportation-management stacks used across Houston port tenants — backups, integrations, performance tuning, and disaster recovery sized for peak vessel weeks.

EDI integration monitoring

Silent EDI failures are expensive. We instrument 204/210/214/856/990 flows with alerting so a broker or shipping-line outage gets caught in minutes, not when a customer calls.

MTSA / USCG compliance-aligned controls

Access controls, audit logging, and documentation that align with your facility's Maritime Transportation Security Act plan — so when a USCG inspector asks for evidence, the binder is ready.

CBP / ACE / AES filing infrastructure

Licensed customs brokers and freight forwarders live inside Customs filing platforms. We keep the infrastructure under them stable, backed up, and audit-ready.

Colocation in a Tier III facility, inland of the Ship Channel

Our engineers work inside the Westland Bunker — a real Tier III data center outside the surge-vulnerable zone of the port itself. Colocation here means your critical systems survive a named-storm evacuation of waterfront facilities.

Comparison

Generic IT vs. Mako for port of houston.

What matters	Generic IT / DIY	Mako
Contractor site access	Start TSA-level vetting from scratch every time — weeks of delay before your MSP can set foot on the terminal	Every engineer already holds a TWIC®. Sponsorship and badging move in days, not weeks.
Overnight vessel-ops coverage	Ticket gets assigned in the morning; your discharge window is already blown	On-call engineer reachable during the shift that matters — vessel ops, gate ops, rail handoff
EDI integration monitoring	You find out the 214s stopped when the customer calls two days later	Active flow monitoring with alerts the moment a partner stops acknowledging
MTSA / USCG audit readiness	Scramble to produce access-log evidence the week of the inspection	Evidence captured continuously; the compliance binder is a standing artifact, not a fire drill
Surge (named storms, labor events, vessel weeks)	Best-effort response shared with every other client at the same time	Pre-planned continuity — primary, secondary, and out-of-region failover with tested RTO / RPO
Cyber-insurance questionnaires for maritime ops	'Yes to everything' on a form nobody reviews; denial risk at claim time	Accurate technical answers grounded in controls we actually run — renewals and claims don't implode
Physical infrastructure	Critical systems on-premises in a facility rated for cargo, not for 9s of uptime	Tier III colocation in the Westland Bunker — continuous power, cooling, and physical security built to data-center spec

Terminal operators, stevedoring, marine services, customs brokers, licensed freight forwarders, drayage, and tank-cleaning shops along the Houston Ship Channel.A named case study for this vertical is being finalized with a client and will be published once they’ve approved the write-up.

FAQ

Port of Houston — common questions.

Do all your engineers actually hold TWIC®?+

Yes. Every member of Mako's engineering staff holds an active Transportation Worker Identification Credential. It's a prerequisite for employment here — we don't have a 'TWIC-cleared subset' we'll send on port work. You get the same engineers whether the job is at your corporate office or on a Barbours Cut terminal apron.

Does TWIC® mean we can skip our site-specific contractor onboarding?+

No — and we wouldn't want you to. TWIC® handles the TSA-level federal background check portion. Most Port tenants layer on additional operator-specific vetting (ISNetworld, Avetta, Veriforce, facility-security-officer sponsorship, site-specific orientation). Our engineers complete those on request. The win is that the federal piece is already done — which is the piece that takes the longest.

Do you work inside the MTSA facilities themselves or just back-office?+

Both, depending on what you need. Back-office IT (billing, ERP, customs-broker systems, accounting) is the steady-state work. On-site support for terminal-operating systems, gate infrastructure, and secure-area equipment is available when the SFO sponsors us onto the facility.

What about the OT / ICS side — crane controls, gate systems, PLCs?+

We work alongside the OT vendor rather than replacing them. Our job is segmenting the IT side cleanly from OT (per CISA and NIST guidance) and making sure the corporate-to-OT crossovers — historian data, plant-to-business reporting, and the inevitable 'one Windows PC somewhere' — are managed, patched, and monitored.

How do you handle surge during named-storm evacuations?+

We test this. Critical systems have off-site failover in the Westland Bunker (inland Tier III). Voice and ticketing are already cloud-hosted. Our on-call rotation plans for the exact scenario where port personnel evacuate — our engineers in the Bunker can keep your back-office running while the waterfront is offline.

We have an in-house IT person. Would you still be a fit?+

Often yes — that's co-managed IT. Your in-house person stays in charge of the day-to-day. We backstop them on TWIC®-required on-site work, after-hours coverage, compliance documentation, and the specialty lifts (EDI, backups, cyber-insurance questionnaires) that are hard to do part-time.

Relevant services

What port of houston clients most often pair with.

Everything below is live on the site today — pick the one closest to what you’re trying to solve and start there.

Service areas

Where we support port of houston clients.

Houston Ship Channel · Barbours Cut · Bayport · Turning Basin · Pasadena · Deer Park · La Porte · Baytown · Galena Park · Channelview and surrounding Houston metro areas.

Services

Services port of houston teams lean on most

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