Dive Brief:
- American Airlines Group Inc. announced it is planning to move more parts of its business to the cloud soon, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
- The airline wants to move its customer website, which saw an average of 1.2 million visitors daily over the summer, to the cloud, in addition to several other applications.
- American CIO Maya Leibman told The Wall Street Journal that the airline is evaluating services from Amazon, IBM and Microsoft to compare costs, service levels and terms and conditions in contracts. The airline plans to select the provider "within months."
Dive Insight:
It may finally be airlines’ turn to adopt cloud. Shaky infrastructure has caused a number of airline computer failures in recent months. In 2015, Quartz began tracking the tech glitches plaguing airlines and preventing them from operating normally. Since then, it has tracked 24 significant airline system failures.
In August, Delta suffered a power outage that led to cascaded failures throughout its computer systems, affecting the airline’s operations systemwide and causing widespread delays and the disruption of thousands of flights.
Airlines, like many other enterprises, still use centralized computer systems that in some cases includes dated technology. The shift to the cloud has the potential to provide the redundant, secure backup systems airlines need to keep systems running and avoid a barrage of unhappy customers.
