Lufthansa Group’s goal is to become the most digital aviation group

Microsoft supports this transformational journey providing leading Cloud platforms and solutions to Lufthansa empowering their employees and business units to achieve more like the One Data Platform project that enables Lufthansa to assist passengers with personalized services before, during, and after their flight.

portal and provision not just an infrastructure environment but their complete end-to-end solution,” he says. “So many processes that were set, many controls that were in place can get obsolete or need some sort of adaptation. And this is what I call change management. It requires a mindset change.”

The end goals of Lufthansa’s digital journey

As Rastogi lays out, Lufthansa's core mission is to connect people, cultures, and economies in a sustainable way. The organisation has made substantial investments in digital transformation projects, with the end goal to offer the most seamless and the bestconnected travel experiences for customers.

“We start by offering an enhanced user experience, which is personalised,” he comments. “It also means that we can offer a homogeneous experience to passengers, no matter which of our airlines they fly or which of our touchpoints they use to interact with us.”

“We have introduced digital self-service solutions for bookings, rebooking refunds and claim management, handling irregular situations and so on,” he adds. “In the long run, we are trying to create an overall marketplace where personalised solutions can be offered to customers based on their individual needs.”

Lufthansa Group’s digital journey is also having a significant contribution to meeting the organisation’s sustainability goals. The group is one of the leading players and is setting the agenda when it comes to sustainability, with the target to be net carbon neutral by 2050.

“We are constantly renewing our fleet with more modern, efficient aircraft, which are also more fuel efficient, and more energy efficient,” Rastogi comments. “We are continuously investing in research and implementation of sustainable aviation fuels. We have established the Cleantech Hub, a platform that is driving more than 80 projects in this space. And to our own customers, we are continuously offering more and more sustainable products on our digital platforms.”

“Digital initiatives contribute a lot to sustainability. If I take the cloud as an example, the cloud allows us to use resources more efficiently and in a more optimised manner.”

As Rastogi explains, Lufthansa Group works hand-in-hand with cloud providers who also have very ambitious goals in regard to sustainability, with more fuel-efficient and more energy-efficient data centres.

“The best part I like about cloud is it offers a lot of transparency in various sustainability dimensions, especially in terms of what kind of services you consume and how it directly translates into carbon footprints,” he comments. “So that generates a lot of interesting and useful information.”

ANKUR RASTOGI GROUP HEAD – IT APPLICATION MANAGEMENT, TRANSITION & CLOUD MIGRATION; SENIOR DIRECTOR, LUFTHANSA GROUP

ANKUR RASTOGI GROUP HEAD – IT APPLICATION MANAGEMENT, TRANSITION & CLOUD MIGRATION; SENIOR DIRECTOR, LUFTHANSA GROUP

This information can further be used to build decision-making algorithms helping Lufthansa Group optimise various parameters within the business domains, from aircraft turnaround time, network scheduling and planning to passenger management. “In my opinion,” Rastogi adds, “every time you make an improvement in efficiency, you're indirectly contributing to sustainability goals.”

Taking a multi-vendor approach to partnerships

Partners are critical for successful outcomes, as Rastogi explains. For every task, a thorough analysis is undertaken to decide if it should be done in-house or should be outsourced. A strategic decision was to employ a multivendor approach.

“In each partner category whether it is cloud, managed service, migration or operations partners — we did a proper due diligence and followed a thorough selection process,” Rastogi says.

For Lufthansa Group, a decision was made to go with a multi-cloud and a hybrid cloud approach. “In our cloud ecosystem, we work quite closely with Microsoft, which is one of our primary landing zones,” Rastogi comments. “Many applications are already in or are in the process of being migrated to Azure. When it comes to managed services, we work with CGI and Kyndryl who are managing the foundations of our cloud ecosystem,” Rastogi adds. “For cloud migration and application operations and management, we work very closely with CGI and Mindtree.”

Cloud strategies and risk management

Talk of risk management or security or compliance might initially seem daunting in the cloud, but as Rastogi explains, many aspects that might apply to any IT project also apply to the cloud.

“Cloud providers themselves spend a lot in avoidance of any vulnerabilities,” he comments. “However the overall end-to-end risk management is a shared responsibility. We need to set up our own organisations and controls over and above the measures provided by the cloud providers.”

As Rastogi explains, measures that would be implemented on a typical IT lifecycle apply to the cloud as well, for instance generating awareness, building the right checks and balances, introducing policies like multifactor authentication, password and encryption policies, configuring and securing infrastructure and networks by implementing the right kind of architecture, firewalls, network security groups and load balancers.

“Another interesting aspect with cloud is the evergreen approach,” he comments. “Cloud does not support legacy technologies or older versions of operating systems and databases. So the cloud is forcing us to continuously upgrade our applications to the latest versions and constantly patch them.”

Continued heavy investment in digital transformation projects

As Rastogi describes, the future at Lufthansa Group will see continued heavy investment into digital transformation projects, balancing the objectives of innovation transformation and operational stability.

“Through digital transformation projects, we are trying to improve our customer satisfaction, and make their overall travel experience simpler and as individualistic as possible. We are trying to offer a seamless and connected experience.”

“We are building up a marketplace environment with different ancillaries and different products, which are personalised,” Rastogi adds. “These will leverage the data and insights that we capture and offer solutions to our customers that fulfil their needs.”

At the same time, along with customerfacing projects, the group is also investing in a number of projects internally, such as solutions to improve employee collaboration and employee experiences.

“We are constantly modernising our application portfolio and our infrastructure portfolio,” Rastogi concludes. “We have projects that are focused on improving our cyber-defence capabilities. In all of these projects, whether in the digital area, innovation area, or modernisation of our application stack, the cloud continues to be a key pillar.”