The recent IT outage at Heathrow was just the latest in a series of IT-related incidents that have impacted the airport and airline industries recently as they embrace digital transformation to serve their customers better in an IoT world. On April 3, for example, European passengers faced severe disruption, with 15,000 flights delayed after a computer failed, while in January a system outage grounded all of United Airlines’ US domestic flights. With airlines serving the US alone carrying a huge 965 million passengers in 2017, and unhappy passengers increasingly likely to vent about bad journeys on social media, it is vital that carriers and airports take steps to minimize journey disruption to their customers which will also serve to protect their brand and reputations in the long run.
Integral role of third parties
From reservation and baggage check-in systems, to crew scheduling and customer resource management (CRM) applications, so many aspects of an airline’s day-to-day operations are dependent on a continuous and reliable IT infrastructure. Third-party vendors often provide everything from application development expertise in an airline’s ticketing systems to an airport’s air traffic control software. As a result, today’s traveling systems are like a well-choreographed ballet – with all members of the dance company needing to safely, precisely and seamlessly operate together for a strong performance and a positive customer experience. Every airline and airport operates slightly differently, leveraging different network services, applications, and third-party vendors to deliver basic network devices, connectivity, and applications – certainly in a regional theatre, but often on a global scale. The ripple effect of a failure in any one system and/or location can create the kind of chaos experienced by travellers in the UK last week.
Other factors can create the opportunity for ‘the perfect storm’ to occur – that is – customer-impacting disruptions. As airlines and/or airports migrate to software defined data centres, software-as-a-service applications and/or public cloud computing, they must ensure availability and performance to their customers, pilots, and airport partners before, during and after transitions. Merger and acquisition activity over the past decade has had the potential to further exacerbate the situation airlines have faced. When different organisations come together, their multiple parallel systems must be merged into one as, all the while, they maintain a continuous operation.
Both digital transformation and M&A activity present huge opportunities both for the airline industry and for the customers it serves. However, these two factors have caused airlines’ IT infrastructure to become increasingly complex, bringing a host of new challenges. Whether the transformation is a newmobile app for reservations, ora new cloud services that is closer to regional theatre operations and dramatically reduces lag time for pilots to download their flight instructions, the airline/ airport industry is powered by innovative technology, which must operate flawlessly at all times.
Visibility powering transformation
Continuous, real-time visibility across the entire IT infrastructure is therefore critical. This visibility must extend to ALL services and their communication paths, whether airline or airport-owned, public or private cloud, to enable IT staff to quickly spot issues and rectify them immediately. The industry is well past the day that tools focused on one device type or one application or one part of the network will be enough to solve the problem. Frankly, ruling out one area as the source of an issue is minutely helpful. Vendor-independent solutions that look among a broad range of services – reservations, ticketing, baggage, flight information, call centres, etc – for the airlines and the airports, and actually pinpoint the problem, are what is needed.
When it comes to M&A, service assurance analysis, before, during and after the merger of systems, migration to the cloud, and in triage and troubleshooting, can reduce the mean time required to resolve issues, thereby reducing the impact on passengers, flights and crew. Through proactive analysis of an airline’s network, it can even reduce the number of incidents by catching them at their very inception, rectifying them long before they become catastrophic. In addition, the ability to share that information among all the vested parties will transform IT teams, increase collaboration among the team and with third-party vendors, and ultimately benefit all by reducing the time it takes to pinpoint and solve these complex, disruptive issues.
Digital transformation in the airline industry holds exceptional promise to improve traveling experiences, ultimately boosting customer loyalty and driving revenue growth. But the stakes are high, and IT failures risk causing significant damage to not just the traveling public, but also to the corporate brands. Dependency on the IT network, third-party providers and the application services operating over them are here to stay; with greater visibility and service assurance, disruptions like those experienced at Heathrow recently can be reduced and possibly avoided entirely.
As Senior Director of Enterprise Business Operations, Eileen is responsible for working with enterprise customers to ensure that NETSCOUT's service assurance and cybersecurity solutions are meeting the needs of our customers and the market. Eileen has over 15 years working at NETSCOUT, where she has held several product management and marketing roles. Prior to joining NETSCOUT, Eileen leveraged her MBA from Boston College working in a variety of technical marketing roles at Motorola Codex, Racal Data Group and Celox Networks.
