Cloud and mobility take off at Gatwick Airport: an interview with CIO Michael Ibbitson

Gatwick Airport CIO Michael Ibbitson tells Computing how analytics, cloud, mobile devices and more are helping to provide the best possible services to passengers

Gatwick is the UK's second largest airport and the biggest single runway airport in the world. There are 23,500 on-site employees who help with the travelling needs of 34 million passengers each year.

Overseeing the large IT infrastructure on which the airport relies to serve its customers is Gatwick Airport CIO Michael Ibbitson.

Ibbitson and his 100-strong team are responsible for IT across the whole airport, including services used by ground handlers, retail staff and everybody in between. It's an IT estate that includes over 100 applications across a network of 25,000 endpoints.

Flights arrive and leave Gatwick Airport 24 hours a day, and Ibbitson described how its new Airport Collaborative Decision Making System (ACDM) analyses data about each flight in an attempt to make the airport as efficient as possible.

"It's about integrating data from the control tower in terms of sequencing of aircraft - is the aircraft coming down, is it staffed, is it fuelled, where is it going, does it have the food it needs - and understanding where it is in the process of taking off," he told Computing.

"[ACDM] is about creating visibility and we've created a portal for all the airport stakeholders so they can see their own operations - so if you're EasyJet you can see EasyJet - giving everyone a consistent view of the data in order to improve efficiency."

The success of ACDM, Ibbitson explained, will be judged on whether it enables Gatwick to achieve its goal of increasing the number of flights it handles per hour from 48 to 55.

"If you never have a time when you're waiting for somebody to take off or there's not too long a gap between aircraft, you save seconds on each flight," he said.

"But over an hour that adds up and allows more aircraft, and more flights coming in and out the airport means more revenue for everyone."

It isn't just on the runway that Gatwick is attempting to harness the power of data, the airport is also gathering as much information as it can about the retailers operating within its buildings to drive improvements.

"It's about getting all that together to understand the spending, what seasonable habits are, what passengers are looking for, then to try and improve the retail mix to make sure we maximise revenue," he said.

Despite the emphasis on data, Gatwick Airport is in the process of consolidating its data centres down from three to one, as Ibbitson looks to take advantage of third-party solutions, such as Amazon Web Services, which hosts the ACDM system.

"We wanted an infrastructure we felt was resilient, and having assessed the options between Azure - which we do use as well - AWS and Google Cloud, we felt AWS was currently the most mature," Ibbitson explained, but insisted Gatwick has no intention of restricting itself to one cloud provider.

"We have a policy that we want to make sure we can host our applications anywhere and we don't want to lock ourselves into one infrastructure provider," he said.

However, the increased use of cloud has brought challenges for Gatwick Airport, including how best to harness applications on mobile devices.

"One of the challenges was how do you get the information to devices? We quickly realised that on-premise solutions don't lend themselves well to being available on a tablet anywhere in the world," he said, before describing how Gatwick has deployed Box's cloud collaboration solution in order ensure secure data and file sharing.

"A key element with Box was security," Ibbitson explained. "Box had all the required security compliance certifications we needed to make sure our data was protected if it was held in their data centres," he said, adding that a command and control feature which can disable any account in the result of a lost device "was the overriding reason to use it".

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Cloud and mobility take off at Gatwick Airport: an interview with CIO Michael Ibbitson

Gatwick Airport CIO Michael Ibbitson tells Computing how analytics, cloud, mobile devices and more are helping to provide the best possible services to passengers

Ibbitson said the main driver for deploying cloud services at Gatwick is not cost - although that is certainly a motivation - but that it allows his team to focus more on how IT can be deployed for the benefit of passengers.

"These cloud service providers, their entire business and their reputation is based on their ability to manage these services. My core business is based around whether I can move passenger's bags onto airplanes. With them taking some of that risk management away from us, it helps us to focus on the day job, which is what I'm sure the passengers want," he said.

Moving services to the cloud has also enabled Gatwick to implement a more flexible mobile device strategy. The airport used to equip staff with BlackBerrys, but now employees are encouraged to use their own devices.

"We run a BYOD set-up and we took away BlackBerry following a one-year transition programme whereby staff could opt in at first, and then eventually it became a more compulsory switch and now all new employees are BYOD."

Ibbitson described how he places no restrictions on the type or number of devices employees can use.

"We don't set limits, you can have a tablet and a smartphone, you can have two tablets if you wanted," he said. "We provide a network that staff can connect to which is secured from our corporate network and secured from the internet and from that they can access a number of applications."

Ibbitson revealed that the most popular smartphones are iPhones and Android devices, with some Windows users and "not that many" using BlackBerry.

In addition to cutting costs and improving efficiency, Ibbitson told Computing that s witching to BYOD has seen employees become better at solving their own IT issues.

"The IT capability of staff has increased as they use their own devices, because they troubleshoot their own problems and they're more inquisitive about the capability of the device," said Ibbitson.

"My view is that our staff will become better trained and more productive because they're more inquisitive about the devices they have," he continued, adding that training about how to best to protect against mobile security threats is regularly provided.

"If staff do that well, a number of your security risks go away, security is about people and behaviour as much as it's about technology," he said.

Ibbitson went onto describe how Gatwick ensures its cyber defences are tight wthrough regular initiatives designed to test security.

"We're connected to the internet and there are a number of people intent on disrupting us, so we have to defend against that, and we do. So we hire companies to do simulated attacks to make sure we've thought about the various avenues of exploitation."

However, he argued that it's ultimately the responsibility of employees to ensure cyber threats are minimised.

"Staff really have a role to play; nobody would leave an airside door open, so why would they give out their password? It's about making a link that it's almost the same thing," he said. "The message is getting through."

Looking forward, Ibbitson told Computing he can see a time when Google Glass - already in use by some airlines - could be harnessed to benefit certain airport staff.

"That technology will have a role in the future, maybe in five years," he said. "I definitely think there's a place for it because I can imagine people out on the airfield able to look into Google Glass and see which aircraft is going to which destination, which dock it's being handled in and by which handler. I think that's very powerful."

Going back to the ACDM portal, Ibbitson described how he could envisage it being combined with wearable technology, allowing staff to get real-time data updates about flights and jobs.

"With the portal we've set up, there's no reason the data can't be integrated. Because it's in AWS and we integrate it with Azure, so we could easily push information out to people wearing Glass to give them a real-time view of what's happening in the airport," he said.

However, Ibbitson suggested wearables have issues to overcome before they're ready for mainstream deployment.

"None of them has passed the test in terms of an ability to withstand 24/7 operation, due to battery requirements, their fragility and overheating problems," he concluded.