Customer Stories
Aviation Leader, Ethiopian Airlines, Saves Millions by Flying with Microsoft Azure
Customer Name: Ethiopian Airlnes
Industry: Airline Service
Location/Country: Ethiopia
Solution: Microsoft Azure
Partner: Reliance Infosystems
Ethiopian Airlines is a thriving pan-African airline based in Africa. The airline is one of Ethiopia’s largest employers and the largest airline in Africa in terms of passengers carried, destinations served, fleet size, and revenue.
Founded in 1945, the airline is known for its excellent service and safety record and has grown into a major international carrier, serving over 150 destinations in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East with a fleet of more than 146 modern aircraft and an average fleet age of five years.
What were the Challenges Faced?
Ethiopian Airlines has grown consistently in recent times. The airline achieved an average growth rate of 25 percent in the seven years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, coupled with its growth it began to face mounting cloud infrastructure costs that eventually became unfeasible and expensive to maintain.
The airline’s exceedingly high cloud costs did not directly translate into their operational capabilities, and it eventually became clear that a change was needed.
The Game Changer
In response to their challenges, Ethiopian Airline consulted with Reliance Infosystems and contracted their support in reining their cloud operation expenses and optimizing their systems. Reliance Infosystems deployed a variety of Azure-based solutions to optimize business operations.
Embracing Transformation
As a result of Ethiopian Airlines’ consultation, Reliance Infosystems partnered with Microsoft to migrate the airline’s server infrastructure to Microsoft Azure and restructure their digital operations to eliminate unnecessary expenses.
The airline scaled down its on-premises data center for a partial migration to Microsoft Azure and implemented a hybrid cloud environment that combined Microsoft Azure with its on-premises infrastructure. This allowed Ethiopian Airlines to retain the flexible upward scaling potential of the cloud while reducing its total costs by keeping normal operations on-site. Reliance Infosystems also implemented security controls and best practices to protect Ethiopian Airlines' data in the cloud.
The partial migration to Microsoft Azure and new hybrid cloud and local infrastructure helped Ethiopian Airlines to achieve its targets of expense control and an improvement in operational efficiency.
