Air India moves IT infra to cloud

Mumbai: India’s leading global airline, Air India, has successfully migrated to a cloud-only IT infrastructure, having closed its historic data centres located in Mumbai and New Delhi.

This makes Air India one of the first major global airlines to have moved all computational workloads exclusively to the cloud.

The move brings remarkable technological agility and scalability to Air India, enabling it to accelerate its digital transformation effort and roll out new digital innovations and applications to enhance operational efficiencies, customer and employee experiences. The closure of the data centres will further result in net savings of nearly a million dollars every year.

Dr Satya Ramaswamy, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Air India, said: “At Air India, we have adopted ‘cloud-only’ as our computational infrastructure philosophy. For us, cloud is not just about cost savings and operational efficiencies but is a fundamental way to reimagine

computing itself and a critical lever to accelerate innovation.”

According to him, Air India has adopted a strategic mix of Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service methodologies in Air India’s transformation journey, allowing the airline to innovate faster and provide a flexible and reliable computational and networking infrastructure for the company.

Given the heavy interdependency on a variety of other systems in the data centres, the entire process of migration to cloud was skillfully and carefully strategized, mapped out, and managed by Air India’s top architects and engineers in Silicon Valley in the US, and Gurugram and Kochi in India. The exercise required the migration of all computational workloads from several mainframes, hundreds of servers, a large amount of data, and hundreds of equipment to the cloud.

Puneet Chandok, President, Microsoft India & South Asia, said, “We are proud to be a part of Air India's cloud transformation journey. Air India’s successful migration to Microsoft Azure shows the power and adaptability of the Microsoft cloud, and how we can effectively support

leaders in the global airline industry like Air India. We are delighted with our continued collaboration with Air India, enabling innovation and unleashing the potential of AI, at the same time building the platform for faster decision making and improved customer experiences.”