Speed of innovation, artificial intelligence, resources that can be quickly expanded when needed… Air France-KLM has no shortage of examples to explain its cloud migration strategy. Despite higher costs than expected and a difficult start, the air transport group is now accelerating. Proof of this dynamism, it has just unveiled several partnerships with major tech players such as Google and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), which are in addition to those it had concluded with Microsoft, Equinix and Accenture. This “move-to-cloud” program is due to end at the end of 2027, with the closure of the group’s three traditional data centers.
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Three pillars
The objective for the group is to prepare the future environment for the group's different businesses, built around three pillars. Thierry Morcq, director of technology at Air France-KLM and in charge of the Move-to-cloud project, cites innovation, with the possibility of developing new applications by benefiting from the capabilities offered by the cloud. This will allow, among other things, increased use of artificial intelligence. For example, maintenance teams can make significant gains in the processing time of the numerous data generated by aircraft, with one case where delays are reduced from several hours to a few minutes. And all new developments are now done directly in the cloud.
Thierry Morcq then establishes the importance of agility, with the possibility of increasing the resources available for given periods, without having to purchase new servers. To illustrate this scalability, he cites the large annual ticket sales marketing campaign, which requires significant resources due to the large number of sales in a short period of time: “For the first time this year, the infrastructure that supports these sales was on the public cloud. The campaign worked very well with sales records on the Dutch and French sides, and we really benefited from the scalability of the cloud since we were able to grow to support the campaign before returning to a nominal size”.
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Finally, Thierry Morcq insists on “time-to-market”, or the time necessary to develop an application and make it available to the teams. It highlights the example of a profession which was able to develop a new service thanks to the provision of an Open AI solution on a tenant (a private space on the cloud) dedicated to Air France-KLM. “Previously, it would have taken several months, but here we have all the security, the operational part and as we know how to operate the platform, it took us two months”he rejoices.
In parallel with these improvements for the group's businesses, it also highlights the savings that this will generate for IT, with the reduction in maintenance costs with the closure of traditional servers, or even those of integration with the use of managed services. Likewise, it touts the gain in security with regularly updated products.
“We started a few years ago with initial initiatives around the cloud, like many companies. Then, around 2019-2020, we initiated a real transformation of data centers with a transformation towards the cloud on one side, with priority given to the public cloud, and colocation on the other,” explains Thierry Morcq.
Google, Microsoft and others
The group's new multi-cloud structure relies on Microsoft's Azure to house the group's thousand business applications. Google Cloud offers, for its part, a so-called “data lakehouse” architecture with its BigQuery solution, capable of receiving raw data, but also processing and analyzing cold data.
This allows Air France-KLM to centralize its data in a single infrastructure, compared to five previously, but also to add artificial intelligence services, particularly generative. Equinix plays the role of “network hub”, ensuring secure communication between these different elements. TCS and Accenture are there to support the migration and integration of this data and applications to the cloud.
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Asked about the absence of European players in this structure, Thierry Morcq explains that this results from an important choice. That of increasing the skills of the group's experts in supporting operational professions and reducing integration engineering work. This requires relying on managed services offered directly by cloud providers.
“To be able to support all of Air France-KLM's businesses, with passenger transport, cargo and finance, you need a sufficiently rich catalog of services. European cloud providers did not have this type of catalog. Among the American hyperscalers, we chose the two present in France and the Netherlands,” explains Thierry Morcq.
Healthy acceleration
This migration now seems to be reaching cruising speed. Of the 1,000 applications that Air France-KLM operates, around a third are already hosted on the cloud, more precisely Microsoft's Azure. And the group now claims an average of 20 applications switched to the cloud per month.
A pace that Thierry Morcq considers high, especially since unlike “certain companies (which) first do lift and shift (migration) by moving applications as is to a public cloud, then transforming them in a second step, (Air France-KLM) does it in a single times “. And this in order to immediately benefit from the advantages of the cloud. Certain applications are nevertheless not transformed, due to lack of added value, and are therefore hosted on a private cloud at Equinix.
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The Air France-KLM technology director recognizes that everything was not done without difficulties.« We had a complicated start in 2021, as is often the case with cloud migrations, but we have found our cruising speed since 2023 »he concedes.
He also mentions the impact on staff: “We did a survey of all the production teams who made the migration. Before the migration, they tell themselves that it will be complicated. During the migration, they say it's complicated with learning cloud technologies. After the migration, they are unanimous on the gain in productivity and agility. »
No site closure
“We retain our expertise”explains Thierry Morcq. It thus ensures that the disconnection of the three traditional data centers, in Toulouse, Valbonne and Amsterdam, in no way means the closure of the sites or the reclassification of staff in other establishments.
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“All staff are guaranteed to stay on their current sites, but they must transform to cloud technologies. We have a training course for this purpose”says the technology director. According to him, 80% of operational teams and 40% of development teams have been trained to date.
The group did not wish to communicate the amount of investment for such a project, but it is calculated in tens of millions of euros over five years. This is larger than initial estimates, of around 50%. But Thierry Morcq assures that the return on investment is proven. This is not immediate due to the high unit costs at the start of the project (low pace, training, maintaining traditional servers, etc.), but it is starting to materialize: over the last twelve months, the group's bill at Azure increased by 64%, while the number of hosted applications quadrupled.
