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Unraveling Network Mysteries: The Art of Reverse Engineering In networking, reverse engineering doesn’t mean figuring out how something was built and trying to copy it (like the German Enigma machine...
The airline industry is a complex ecosystem where even the smallest disruption can have far-reaching consequences. From delayed flights to widespread cancellations, network outages can result in significant financial losses, damaged reputations, and frustrated passengers.
Major airlines have experienced firsthand the devastating impact of network failures underscoring the critical need for enhanced network resilience in the aviation sector.
The High Cost of Downtime
The airline industry is a complex ecosystem where even the smallest disruption can have far-reaching consequences. From delayed flights to widespread cancellations, network outages can result in significant financial losses, damaged reputations, and frustrated passengers.
Major airlines have experienced firsthand the devastating impact of network failures underscoring the critical need for enhanced network resilience in the aviation sector.
Key IT Challenges Facing Airlines
Airline IT departments grapple with a unique set of challenges:
| Under Investment in IT Systems | Aging Systems or Systems Designed not to Work Together | Lack of IT Staff and Training |
|---|---|---|
| • Caused by poor airline profitability • Need to identify problems and priorities • Over dependency on humans for monitoring and risk avoidance |
• Complexity due to a multitude of integrated legacy systems that must talk to each other • Lack of ROI cause low investment in operations • Lack of focus on building a unified system • Risk of a break in part of the fragile system causing a major disruption |
• Lack of automation causes inability to keep pace with operational noise • Making network changes takes too long and is risky • Operations is mainly reactive and manual |
These factors contribute to a network environment that is vulnerable to disruptions.
Airline Spotlight
NetBrain analyzed over 34,000 tickets from a major airline over a 24-month period and reduced MTTR for 12 use cases providing >$10M a year of savings. Read more about this and how another major airline achieved 25% MTTR reduction.
The Path to Network Resilience
To address these challenges, airlines must prioritize network resilience as a core business objective. By investing in no-code network automation, airlines can significantly improve their network performance and reduce the risk of outages.
Key strategies for building network resilience include:
Improve network reliability through continuous network assessment to find hidden problems that could lead to outages and disruptions. NetBrain’s network automation offers:
- Auto-Discovery
- Reverse engineer and decode your golden network design to create a library for the application of automation
- Application Performance Assessment
- Continuously assess critical applications for performance, topology, and connectivity issues and avoid application outages
- Continuous Assessment of Configuration Drift
- Golden configurations
- PCI/SOC best practices
- Device security hardening
- EoL/EoS
- Continuous Network Performance Assessment
- Continuously assess critical WAN interface, QoS performance-related metrics
Key Airline Automation Use Cases
- Critical app and hybrid-cloud network visibility and mapping
- Determine what network devices need what policy rules to ensure application health
- Triggered automation integration with ITSM tools for lower MTTR/MTTI
- Troubleshooting applications by comparing saved golden paths and ports against live paths
- Perform path calculations continuously even if a firewall is blocking the path
- Viewing L3 and L2 together
- Integrating network maps with monitoring tools to easily obtain NetFlow reports
- High-value observability of priority root causes, providing more context and understanding (intelligence) to monitoring
IT Processes Suited for Automation
TransformationAirlines can reduce OPEX and audit pain through continuous network assessments using automation. This reduces the chance of outages while ensuring the reliability of redundancy in place.
Furthermore, automation improves customer satisfaction by preventing costly flight delays and cancellations due to outages, enhancing Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) by minimizing repetitive incidents, and reducing manual work to increase efficiency. Overall, automation is a critical tool for airlines to maintain robust IT operations and deliver a seamless customer experience.