Airline Doubles Migration Speed.

About.

Constrained by a slow and cumbersome migration process from a conventional cloud provider, a leading global airline sought to modernise its IT infrastructure. Long migration timelines were affecting innovation and undermining the airline’s ability to respond to changing market dynamics.

The focus of the migration was moving a large core business application suite to AWS.

The Challenge.

The timeline the airline had agreed with their existing provider was slipping, due to a poor structure and slow execution model. A lack of agility meant the migrations weren’t moving as quickly as they might’ve been.

This can be a common issue with larger system integrators. It’s partly down to ecosystem complexity between the customer and the provider. And, many have traditional IT backgrounds, so haven’t delivered the volumes of cloud migrations compared to cloud-native providers. 

It means their processes are often heavy. They’re just not cloud-native. And that’s not their fault, they’ve come from the data center realms of traditional IT. All their processes and tools have evolved from a traditional IT world. 

The Solution.

An expedited migration approach

To address the migration bottlenecks, the airline partnered with Nordcloud to accelerate migrations with an agile, cloud-native approach.

A cloud-native provider like Nordcloud thinks the other way. We’re born in the cloud, with a different way of thinking, really knowing the ins and outs of delivering cloud in a way that injects speed into these kinds of projects. It’s the reason we were brought in – to bring real acceleration and help meet timeline targets.

So, in this case, we simplified the migration strategy. There wasn’t a development environment in place, so the initial plan was to create one. But the Nordcloud team suggested that this wasn’t needed. It wasn’t an efficient way of working.

Instead, we migrated the QA environment, completed the baseline template, and replicated this into development. So, once the replication started, we didn’t need to go in and look at it again. It meant we could focus on the production of the migration, and get to this point faster. 

The result is environmental parity – essentially a development environment created that’s comparable to a QA or test environment. So, the test environment is already migrated, and the learnings taken have already enabled us to deliver the production migration risk-free.

The Result.

With our capabilities, we got up and running fast, delivering the first 3 apps within 3 months. And we’re on track to migrate 25 within 11 months. How does that compare to the traditional system integrator? Well, it’s almost twice as fast – they spent 24 months migrating 30 applications. 

Being 100% cloud means we’re accustomed to bringing in cloud-based automation tools and processes. It means we’re able to plan and sequence migrations in a way that doesn’t create conflicts, and keeps things moving quickly.  

We create efficiencies and proactively navigate road bumps. We don’t superimpose traditional infrastructure in the cloud, but use automation and best practices to take away the complexity of migrations, which we’ve seen as a real driver in many business cases like this. 

Essentially, we have the technical cloud-native knowhow that traditional providers don’t have. So we’re able to really get in there, under the hood, to do the hard stuff quickly and easily, which clients seem to really appreciate.