A community cloud
The case for industry adoption of cloud services is compelling. The question therefore becomes not whether to adopt cloud computing but which approach – public or private – to use. The public cloud is where the full cost benefits can be realized but high profile outages, such as that of Amazon’s EC2 cloud platform in April 2011, have underlined the belief that public infrastructure is not secure and reliable enough for the high end computing needs of air transport. The 2011 Airline IT Trends Survey found that as many as 78% of airlines showed a preference to access IT infrastructure from within their own private cloud5. So how can the industry capture the significant benefits of scale and higher utilization rates offered by public cloud services while retaining the security and reliability of a private cloud? A cloud exclusively designed and built for the needs of the air transport community represents the opportunity the industry needs. Based on secure, shared infrastructure meeting industry standards and policies, it provides the cost and service management advantages of shared infrastructure with the protection and dependability of a private cloud.
Shared infrastructure Airlines have been using shared infrastructures for network connectivity and airport-based operations for many years. The application service provider (ASP) channel is also something airlines are well aware of. Many of the world’s major airlines receive reservations, inventory, departure control and other software services from trusted third party providers. The main attraction of shared infrastructure is the lower unit costs achieved through scale and the simpler service management which becomes the problem of the infrastructure provider. The economies of scale that a community cloud could 8|
deliver cannot be ignored. A Microsoft paper on the economics of the cloud6 reported that the TCO per server of a 100,000-server data centre could be as much as 80% lower than that of a 1,000-server data centre. With that level of TCO reduction it is difficult to envisage that an in-house IT operation building out its own private cloud could be cost competitive at the same level of service as a dedicated industry cloud could. Sharing infrastructure among a closed industry community brings benefits beyond just cost savings. Cloud users can access industry applications that are pre-connected to organizations and sites across the breadth of the industry, such as airports and suppliers. This can dramatically increase the agility of a company by speeding up its ability to respond to business needs, as well as deriving the benefits from the application, faster.
Consistent global performance Achieving reliable and consistent IT performance levels over a distributed route network for critical operations, such as check-in, is a major headache for airlines and it is one that a public cloud cannot readily address. Cloud style computing is heavily dependent on the reliability and resilience of the Wide Area Network (WAN) supporting it and data centre locations. Many of the applications used in air travel need to reside close to the end-user to handle the constant refreshing of data in an acceptable time-frame. Public cloud offerings can be based too far away from the end users and its underlying public telecommunication network does not have the robustness on a global scale to meet this need for high speed processing. Even with private clouds it can be prohibitively expensive for airlines to ensure consistent levels of service across their entire route network. In some cases, latency issues have forced airlines to build local hosting centres for some applications close to where the end-user requires them – usually at the airport. The strong diversification benefits of an industry cloud would lead to a more predictable bandwidth requirement and as a result a more deterministic latency to cope with peaks in demand – plus a margin of error. This would ensure that standardized performance levels could be achieved across the industry. SITA currently works on response times of no more than 100ms between the data centre and end-user. This degree of over-provisioning can be achieved far more cost effectively at the industry level than for an individual business with a private cloud, where the capacity would sit idle for most of the time. © SITA 2011