Consulting for Moving Applications to the Cloud
How do you successfully bring the traditional, heterogeneous IT landscape into the cloud and thereby increase the reliability and availability of the systems? Edelweiss Air has found the answer with the support of 1stQuad: A “Cloud Transformation Blueprint” shows as reference architecture how dependencies can be reduced with a cloud transformation and how a better, future-proof IT can be built.
Edelweiss Air AG
Edelweiss Air is a Swiss leisure airline that is 100% owned by Swiss International Air Lines and is, therefore, part of the Lufthansa Group. It operates flights from its base at Zurich Airport to European and intercontinental destinations.
Heterogeneous IT environment with highly nested dependencies
Like some companies, the Swiss airline Edelweiss Air operates a very heterogeneous IT environment with many silo applications and highly nested dependencies. The overview is hardly guaranteed, and if a system fails, unexpected and undesirable consequences can arise. If, for example, no ticket bookings have been possible for several hours, the existence of the company is threatened.
Therefore Edelweiss Air approached 1stQuad to find a solution for this complex problem. It quickly became clear that only a decoupling of the systems and the definition of clear interfaces can lead to success. Not only the internal systems had to be taken into account, but also third-party systems, which further increased the complexity.
Under these conditions and with a view to future requirements, there was actually only one approach that seemed appropriate: The company’s own systems are transferred to the cloud as autonomous units, and a service bus and API management ensure correct communication. Together with the client 1stQuad developed a complete cloud architecture based on Microsoft Azure conceptually in a few meetings – a “Cloud Transformation Blueprint” was created. For this purpose three specific, mission-critical applications were architecturally designed in detail, which had caused problems in the past.
The Cloud Transformation Blueprint creates clarity
The IT managers at Edelweiss Air are thus provided with a concept that they can present to the management. The Cloud Transformation Blueprint gives the company the security of being on the right track, at the same time demonstrating the feasibility and practicability of a cloud transformation and providing guidelines for the future evaluation and development of technologies and software.
