Alaska Air Group Inc. (NYSE:ALK) is preparing to modernise its technology infrastructure after a series of outages disrupted operations and weighed on financial performance, as the airline works toward its ambition of becoming a global carrier.
The Seattle-based airline is evaluating a shift of key operational systems, back-office processes and data center functions to cloud-based platforms, Chief Financial Officer Shane Tackett said in comments to Bloomberg last week at the company’s headquarters.
“We will incrementally be using more cloud to create redundancy and resiliency,” Tackett said. “That’s work that we’re going undertake this year to understand if it makes sense for us to stay in the data center business or move to cloud over time.”
According to a company spokesperson, Alaska Air expects to increase annual spending on technology by tens of millions of dollars, split between capital expenditures and operating costs.
As part of the review, the airline will assess multiple cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The initiative follows earlier work with consulting firm Accenture, which was brought in after the outages.
Tackett said the initial focus is on building stronger system redundancy. “If one of your databases goes down, you can immediately turn on the one right next to it.”
In October, Alaska Air was forced to cancel more than 400 flights, disrupting travel plans for about 49,000 passengers, after a failure at its primary data center. The airline later confirmed that the outage knocked out a critical system used to calculate aircraft takeoff weight and balance.
Separately, Alaska Air has also faced operational challenges tied to a broader global outage at Microsoft Azure, which hosts some of the airline’s systems.