Airline IT chiefs voice reservations about cloud services

SITA, a specialist IT services provider to the airline industry, plans to provide cloud services from next year, but faith in the services it will offer seemed largely absent from customers attending its annual IT summit.

Familiar concerns focusing on the availability and performance of cloud services were evident among IT infrastructure support staff in an industry which is perceived as notoriously resistant to change.

The fact that the airline industry uses about 800 bespoke software applications, rather than off-the-shelf packages, will make it even more difficult for SITA to migrate them onto standardised service packages.

"You need to make sure all the ISPs stay online and all the software used by the airlines is ported into the cloud, but how do you make sure that happens?" asked a representative of Thomson Airways.

"And what about a single point of failure – if we put in SITA [cloud service] tomorrow and SITA is down, how do we cope with that?"

Another audience member from a Jordanian airline expressed similar reservations, pointing out that availability is a thorny issue in a country with just one ISP. "If I have a local network, I have applications on the desktop that I can still access. But if everything is on the cloud and I lost the internet connection, the PC is less use than an old Nokia mobile and I can do nothing with it," he said.

SITA will deliver its ATI cloud in partnership with Orange Business Services (OBS). The France Telecom subsidiary spent €750m upgrading its global IP MPLS network in 2010 and is currently procuring additional hosting space in datacentres planned for Frankfurt, Atlanta, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney and Johannesburg.

Gregory Oiullon, SITA vice president of ATI Cloud, said that he wanted DaaS to be no more than 100 milliseconds away from any user, ensuring that user experience and desktop performance is exactly the same as when working locally.

He also said options to host services closer to the customer to avoid potential issues around availability and national data protection regulations, which dictate where certain types of information can be stored, could be arranged within individual contracts.

"If you look at the applications running on most desktops now, how many can still run if they are not connected? Very few," he said.

"We will offer regional gateways and content delivery networks (CDNs), which offer caching at a local or regional cloud level depending on specific requirements, but you might also want to go to a 3G backup solution."