LG CNS, Korean Air IT System 100% Transition to 'Public Cloud'

[Asia Economy Reporter Kang Nahum] LG CNS announced on the 21st that it has successfully completed the 100% migration of Korean Air's enterprise IT systems to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud. This achievement comes three years after securing the migration contract.

Korean Air is the first major global airline to migrate its entire enterprise IT system to a public cloud. LG CNS supported Korean Air's digital transformation (DX) to help the airline prepare ahead of other global airlines for the post-COVID-19 era.

Building new systems in a cloud environment is relatively easy, but migrating already established systems to the cloud requires a high level of difficulty.

First, when migrating to the cloud, it is essential to minimize changes to existing applications such as flight control, cargo management, and reservation management. Designing to maximize cloud advantages?such as immediate recovery availability in case of system failure and ease of resource expansion in response to changes in the airline business?is complex.

To ensure service availability, LG CNS duplicated Korean Air's entire IT system across two physically separated cloud data centers. Even if one cloud experiences a failure, the duplicated cloud can immediately operate the same system. Additionally, to prepare for disasters in Korea, a disaster recovery (DR) cloud was established overseas.

Korean Air's IT system consists of over 200 applications. Since many of these applications operate 24/7 without interruption, meticulous planning was necessary for the cloud migration. LG CNS divided the entire IT system migration into about 10 phases and conducted functional tests, performance checks, migration scenario planning, and rehearsals in the cloud environment, successfully achieving uninterrupted migration by preventing service downtime in advance.

LG CNS, together with Korean Air, has completed the cloud migration work and is planning an 'Application Modernization (AM)' project. AM is a core cloud technology that enables immediate reflection of changes in consumer demand and trends into business systems with minimal time and cost.

Kim Taehoon, Executive Director of LG CNS Cloud Business Division, said, "LG CNS is implementing a ‘Public Cloud First’ strategy through partnerships with global cloud service providers such as AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud," adding, "As the strongest managed cloud service provider in Korea, we will accelerate cloud-based digital transformation for enterprises.”