Star Alliance Wants Amazon Web Services to Lift It Out of the Crisis
Skift Take
Star Alliance says its move to Amazon Web Services has let it more quickly enhance many passengers' processes. That's promising news because a lot of digital innovation is still needed for booking and traveling on international itineraries served by more than one carrier.
Star Alliance, a consortium of 26 carriers including United Airlines, Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines, Air Canada, and All Nippon Airways, completed last week its move of its applications to AWS (Amazon Web Services), a cloud computing vendor, with an initial goal of taming costs.
"We're pretty clean when it comes to moving to the AWS cloud environment," said Jeremy Drury, head of digital and technology at Star Alliance. "The move was deliberate. One [goal] was to reduce our costs as we go to 2021. [The second was] to be ready for the scale that we are expecting as traffic increases."
During the pandemic, the cloud let Star Alliance cut its computing costs by 30 percent. The organization only paid for the reduced level of computing that it needed, rather than for excess on-premise servers.
CEO Jeffrey Goh said at industry online conference AWS Reinvent that he believed its computing costs based on normal travel volumes will be down by about a quarter.
Star Alliance's migration from data centers to on-demand enterprise computing took place in stages, with th
