Back to Air Transport IT Review - Issue 2, September 2010

The digital airport

Unlocking the potential of airport infrastructure - a community approach

Industry imperatives are forcing a reconsideration of how to use technology to support airport business functions. Short-term needs to shave costs and maximize service availability compete with long-term goals of improving workforce productivity and realizing the potential of so-called 'connected' or 'digital' aircraft.

Airlines and airports also have their own business needs to meet. Airlines are opening and closing new routes, consolidating offices, mobilizing their workforces and reducing their number of IT staff at outstations.

Airports are looking for enhancements to operational efficiencies by reducing the number of airline-specific IT set-ups, as well as ways to make customer service improvements with better performance, and generate new revenue opportunities.

The opportunity

In this environment, where each airline must work with many airports, and each airport must serve many airlines, there is a real opportunity to examine how the IT infrastructure can better enable and facilitate business performance.

A community approach with cloud computing - further leveraging virtualization as a technology - can offer many benefits, such as collaboration and cost-savings. It will ultimately allow the air transport industry to do more with existing and emerging technologies.

According to Benoit Delanoë, IT Plan Director for Orange Business Services: "Cloud computing and virtualization are going to change the way we purchase, use, and even think about IT."

The air transport industry is already seeing this impact with the introduction of mobile technology, the first virtualized infrastructure. But mobility is just the beginning. Moving forward - from collaborative decision-making to new generation aircraft - virtualization will be the norm.

The challenge?

From the airport's perspective, there are several user experiences to consider: business-to-employee, business-to-business, and business-to-customer, for instance. Each user experience, in turn, relies on several clouds: air transport industry ASPs (application service provision), airline and airport data centres, and the Internet and public cloud.

Wireless

The challenge is to optimize the user experience from any device into any cloud, which may sound easy, but is not. Wireless access needs to be simplified, for a start. Existing wireless infrastructure needs to be exploited to the maximum so that airport employees, airlines and passengers all share the same access.

To ensure simplified complexity and specificity of each local wireless environment, SITA recommends a wireless aggregator approach. This maximizes the number of airlines sharing the same airport infrastructure.

Context and integration

Connectivity is not enough, however. There needs to be value once you connect, so user context and application integration are just as vital: the right people accessing the right information at the right time. This ability needs to come from the application itself, and it may require the integration of multiple sources of data from multiple applications.

Consistency and security

Consistency is another essential. With the decreasing times during aircraft turnaround, users need content delivered in an accelerated fashion without compromising performance.

Security has to be guaranteed too. All tenants using the same infrastructure need a certain level of separation; each environment needs to be isolated.

"It's not only about the capability on the network side to separate different sub-VPNs," says SITA Senior Product Manager Benoît Verbaere. "It's also about using the same kind of approach on the server level, the storage level, the application level, and the desktop level.

"And it's not only about the technology," Verbaere continues. "It's about the opportunity for airports and other players to transform the technology into use-case related services across different environments."

A Community Cloud for the ATI

The answer to the challenge lies in an air transport industry (ATI) Community Cloud. A robust multi-tenant community platform for IT needs. A platform with an on-demand, elastic CPU, memory, storage and connectivity. A platform that is secure and pre-connected to LAN, IP VPN, and the Internet. And a platform that is fully managed with SLA, DR and back-up in the cloud.

This Community Cloud needs to be a multi-purpose infrastructure that supports:

Airline applications, running locally at airports, for example aircraft servers, process and business specific applications and content.
Utility services like DNS, DHCP, file, security, e-mail.
Hosting of virtual desktop, application and desktop streaming.
Application integration, business intelligence and aggregating various data feeds.
Standardized "Airport IT Catalogue" for airlines and tenants.

The Community Cloud should be an enabler for an 'as service' community IT model. This will reduce the IT footprint and cut costs for IT resources, provide ease of entry and scale, and facilitate management, automation and chargeback.

How do we get there?

Facilitate technology adoption and the approach, which includes the creation of community services and shared components to provide lower entry costs.
Maximize return on investment, with pre-positioning of technology and reuse, and the integration of applications, to optimize running costs.
Leverage existing and local infrastructure. Facilitating airline access to airport IT infrastructure will enable collaboration and facilitate innovation.

It's well known that cloud computing and virtualization are game changers for IT in the air transport industry. We've seen their first impact with mobility - from the airport workforce to the passenger. This trend will only accelerate in the coming years.

Airports need to be prepared to take advantage of the technologies - both existing and emerging - that will facilitate collaboration and cost savings. SITA recommends a community approach, where a community cloud at the airport provides a robust multi-tenant platform that is efficient and secure. The roadmap to get there is not void of challenges, but SITA is prepared to lead the way.

(Based on the Digital Airport Industry Insight Session at the 2010 Air Transport IT Summit.)

SITA Innovation Focus Groups

SITA invites you to participate in a forum for the development of new solutions to the air transport industry. The focus is on business operations and business process transformation requirements in a joint airport / airline approach. Review and provide advice on SITA development proposals, pilots and proofs of concept. For more information contact info@sita.aero.