Air India has successfully migrated to a cloud-only IT infrastructure, having closed its historic data centres in Mumbai and New Delhi. This makes it one of the first major global airlines to have moved all computational workloads exclusively to the cloud.

The closure of the data centres will further result in nearly a million dollars of net savings every year.

Given the heavy interdependency on a variety of other systems in the data centres, the entire process of migration to the cloud was skillfully and carefully strategised, mapped out, and managed by Air India’s top architects and engineers in Silicon Valley in the US and Gurugram and Kochi in India.

The exercise required the migration of all computational workloads from several mainframes, hundreds of servers, a large amount of data, and hundreds of equipment to the cloud.

“At Air India, we have adopted ‘cloud-only’ as our computational infrastructure philosophy. For us, cloud is not just about cost savings and operational efficiencies but is a fundamental way to reimagine computing itself and a critical lever to accelerate innovation.

“We have adopted a strategic mix of Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service methodologies in Air India’s transformation journey, allowing us to innovate faster and provide a flexible and reliable computational and networking infrastructure for the company,” Dr Satya Ramaswamy, chief digital and technology officer, Air India, said.

“The contribution of our data centres to making Air India a global airline is impossible to leave uncounted. Our colleagues, who have worked at these data centres for years and decades, were made integral parts of this complex migration exercise, and they have been trained along the way on new skills to continue contributing to a modernised Air India”, he added.

Air India was one of the earliest airlines globally to have adopted high-performance computing and storage in the initial years of the computing age. The now-closed data centres were once used to drive innovations and automation across multiple spheres of the airline’s commercial and financial functions.