Global Aviation Cloud: Lufthansa Systems provides complete solutions as cloud services

Lufthansa Systems today announced that it has integrated its solutions for flight operations (NetLine), route planning and navigation (Lido) and finance management (SIRAX®) into a new cloud delivery platform following a successful project phase. The Global Aviation Cloud is a cloud service developed specifically to meet the needs and security standards of airlines. Lufthansa Systems has thus created a forward-looking infrastructure for its customers which deliver administrative, operational and technological benefits. The ultimate goal is to offer the entire Lufthansa Systems product portfolio as a cloud service in the near future.

"The strategic shift from monolithic legacy systems to cloud services is a major challenge in the aviation industry. Technologies such as AIX, which was the basis for the development of our Lido product, are not easy for cloud platforms to handle because they are closely tied to hardware. We therefore completely overhauled Lido's software architecture so that we could expedite the creation of the cloud," said Oliver Grimm, Head of IT Infrastructure Development, Technology & Information Security at Lufthansa Systems. "We successfully tested the various solutions from the cloud, and the first customers have already migrated. This has laid the foundation for the innovative and future-proof Global Aviation Cloud."

Thanks to cloud solutions, it is often no longer necessary to run applications, systems and resources locally on a physical server (on-premise). Instead, they can be provided and used as needed in the form of software as a service (SaaS). "With the SaaS model we offer our customers full service from a single source so they can concentrate on their core business. As the service provider, Lufthansa Systems handles all of the IT administration, including maintenance and software updates," said Grimm.

A complete cloud governance model was defined and set up as part of the Global Aviation Cloud. This also covers the creation of new teams and roles. The Operations Center in Budapest, for example, is responsible for infrastructure operations and was established alongside the pure application operations. The end-to-end managed service is therefore completely within the domain of Lufthansa Systems.

Lufthansa Systems primarily uses Microsoft Azure as its public cloud provider. Special technical set-ups relating mainly to security aspects turn the public cloud into a virtual private data center. With a growing number of data centers in 54 regions around the world, Azure can provide services in close proximity to customer sites, which enables faster data transmission. The strategic partnership with the cloud provider additionally increases the flexibility, scalability and security of the applications.

By 2021, the more than 70 customers using Lido, NetLine and SIRAX® products should be able to access the solutions on-demand from the Global Aviation Cloud.