Gulf Air becomes the first company in the Kingdom to introduce this cutting-edge ‘Cloud Computing’ technology, taking the country’s IT capability to a higher level.
The adoption of ‘Cloud Computing’ enables Gulf Air to take advantage of the high-speed, high-capacity computing power the technology offers through its virtual ‘cloud’ of servers that would allow the airline to achieve a much faster and more efficient business performance resulting in enhanced customer service in every step of the customer’s journey.
“Cloud Computing is the new evolution in the IT world towards delivering faster and more efficient IT and business services than ever before while reducing infrastructure and service costs. Internationally, this new technology is being fast embraced by every corporate entity and we are glad to be the pioneers once again to introduce this in the Kingdom of Bahrain,” Dr. Jassim Haji, Gulf Air Acting Director Information Technology, said.
“Traditionally, business applications have always been very complicated and expensive. You need a large infrastructure and applications, and a whole team of experts to run them. However, as businesses are becoming increasingly competitive and customers’ needs are changing constantly, it is important that we proactively address their needs more efficiently through appropriate technological empowerment but without maximizing costs. Cloud computing is the solution to achieve this: from back-end business applications, platform services, virtual servers, storage and processing to front-end support services, it allows us to move with greater agility and respond faster to our customers.”
“By moving to cloud computing, Gulf Air’s IT is providing crucial customer-end services such as Contact Centre, Internet booking, online-payment, online check-in, extending IT services to new destinations, etc., faster with much less cost and manpower which in turn enables Gulf Air to respond to our customers immediately,” Dr. Haji added.
“Looking ahead, cloud computing promises new ways to collaborate everywhere through mobile devices, which is increasingly playing a major role in aviation business. With this new technology, we are well positioned to serve our ‘fly-by-wire’ passengers,” Dr. Haji added.
The new technology also saves substantial cost in investing in expensive IT infrastructure and software, as it requires less number of servers, less hardware maintenance, less software licenses, less environmental resources and less manpower. Besides, since all databases are stored in a virtual but integrated cloud, Gulf Air need not invest in expensive database licenses. The adaptive nature of the technology allows using the server capacity as and when required and in real time, which means it saves substantial cost on server acquisitions.
Gulf Air is also setting up another cloud for disaster recovery in a remote site independent of the main cloud so critical business applications and data can be virtually accessed and made available to business with minimal intervention to ensure business continuity and maintain our day-to-day business and operations, in case of any unforeseen disaster.