Airline IT chiefs voice reservations about cloud services

Airlines will take more persuading than most before they trust desktop applications and services to remote provision

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."

Airline IT chiefs voice reservations about cloud services

Airlines will take more persuading than most before they trust desktop applications and services to remote provision

SITA is certain that nascent demand for flexible cloud-based infrastructure and software services will outweigh any trepidation, predicting that most airlines will gradually move IT provision to a cloud-based model.

According to the Airline IT Trends Survey 2011, 93 per cent of airlines have implemented or plan to implement cloud computing services by 2014, with 77 per cent planning to implement desktop-as-a-service.

"We do not believe that all organisations will move 100 per cent into the cloud on day one, but they do need the cloud. Once we place the applications in proximity to the end user, they have the opportunity to move towards cloud at their own pace," said SITA chief executive Francesco Violante.

SITA's Oiullon highlighted flexibility as the main attraction for airline IT managers, though he believes cost savings of 20-30 per cent can be achieved through on-premise hardware consolidation and streamlined support.

"At the moment, there is one server under each chair in an airport. The requisite local administration means there is a lot of capital expenditure going into buying and maintaining them," he said.

Following a recent proof of concept exercise, Malaysia Airlines is one SITA customer that does see the benefit of buying cloud services.

It embarked on a wider call centre transformation project in September 2010, and wanted to give agents the ability to log on to central services from their homes or other locations.

Starting with its London and Singapore offices, it rolled out thin clients which access virtual desktops and applications stored in datacentres through a SITA-supplied virtual private network (VPN). The move has sped up and simplified application and operating system upgrades and enabled call centre agents to be brought online quickly to deal with sudden spikes in demand.

"There were some challenges: redesigning our current network architecture to link up the hubs and issues with ISP bandwidth in Asia because we needed certain levels to operate safely – SaaS and DaaS will not work without the right network," explained Abdul Mutalib Ishak, vice president of retail and distribution at Malaysia Airlines.

A survey of 546 contact centres, published this week by IT services company Dimension Data, found that cloud-based services is the fastest growing technology trend in contact centres worldwide. However, it was only rated the sixth most important trend overall.

Details have yet to be revealed about the size, server capacity or power rating of the six new datacentre facilities that OBS will procure, though the company said the infrastructure will also host services for companies outside the airline industry.

"It is too early to say whether those datacentres will be tier 4 or tier 3 facilities," said Orange Business Services spokesman Vivek Badrinath.

"The design work is not completed yet, but we will use common, modular blocks of software virtualisation and orchestration layers. We are already building a big datacentre in France with advanced power efficiency, and we will use that know-how."