Critical Network Upgrade to Avoid Disruption for an Airline

The airline’s LAN and WAN network equipment was at end of life and, faced with significant technical debt, there was a critical need to define and execute a set of remediation activities including new hardware, standards and governance.​

The airline recognised the significant risk in undertaking a migration of this scale given the need to maintain 24/7 operational excellence, despite the age of infrastructure, lack of standards and mature processes.

They therefore engaged Leading Resolutions to lead the migration of their LAN/WAN network.

Leading Resolutions created the business case, identifying performance improvements achievable through replacing the LAN and WAN whilst reducing both cost and risk.

Replacing the LAN and WAN posed a significant challenge. Planes are always flying and  commercial sites operate 24/7 for bookings and passenger check-in. We created the plan to implement new LAN and WAN hardware, taking in to account the limited change windows available.

We worked collaboratively with the internal team and 5 external IT partners to deliver the implementation, working 24/5 to carry out implementations out of hour and later moving to a 24/7 model, with no increase to resource.

We negotiated the contracts for a new MPLS network & refreshed LAN, implemented robust project governance, ran the full go to market activity for new suppliers and created an end to end, repeatable and scalable installation and implementation methodology.

The implementations were completed on schedule, with positive feedback on the stability and performance and no impact to flights, passenger bookings and checking in or slowness at peak times.