Hybrid cloud finds takers among Asian carriers

A growing number of Asian airlines are looking to the hybrid cloud to reduce IT costs.

In October 2017, Malaysia Airlines (MAS) embarked on a massive project with TCS to migrate its core datacentre infrastructure and applications to a hybrid-cloud model, with 80% of its assets hosted on Microsoft Azure and 20% on a private cloud.

Over the next five years, MAS expects to improve its cost efficiency by 50%, improve business performance by 80% and reduce customer response time from days to hours.

Joining MAS in the move to the hybrid cloud is Cathay Pacific. The Hong Kong-based carrier recently moved from its legacy infrastructure to a hybrid cloud comprising a Red Hat OpenStack-based private cloud and public cloud instances.

With its new hybrid cloud set-up, Cathay Pacific expects to support and move over 50 consumer-facing applications across its hybrid infrastructure, scaling resources up and down when necessary.

Perhaps more importantly, the airline will be able to bring new services to market faster in a highly competitive industry. Already, it has been able to roll out 200 application changes per day, up from just 20 previously. This improved efficiency has translated to a lower total cost of ownership for its production systems.

That the hybrid cloud is fast-becoming the infrastructure of choice is not surprising.

Many enterprises, including airlines, see hybrid IT as having best of both worlds, giving them the ability to tap on public cloud resources to meet new or fluctuating business demands, while continuing to run legacy and certain mission-critical applications in their own private cloud datacentres.

In fact, 24% of ASEAN respondents in the TechTarget IT Priorities 2018 survey cited hybrid IT as a priority this year, representing a growth rate 23% year-on-year.

With more ASEAN organisations looking to implement hybrid IT strategies, about a third of IT professionals who participated in the survey expect to roll out public cloud infrastructure services this year – higher than the APAC average of 25%.

The growth of cloud infrastructure services and the decline of traditional datacentre outsourcing are driving a massive shift towards hybrid infrastructure services. Gartner, a technology research firm has predicted that 90% of organisations will adopt hybrid infrastructure management capabilities by 2020.