Flight Centre is seeking to rationalise its cloud subscriptions across its global operations in a bid to lower costs and adjust to increasingly flukey headwinds expected to hit the travel sector.
The travel giant currently manages around 200 cloud subscriptions across the 34 brands and other businesses operates around the world.
However, the company’s DevOps and observability lead Geoff Jubb told attendees at the Gartner Infrastructure Summit that the company would like to “kick that [number] down”.
Speaking to iTnews on the sidelines of the event, Jubb was unable to reveal exactly how many cloud contracts the company is seeking to exit but confirmed that it had set a broad target.
Jubb said that the company is still “in its infancy” when it comes to consolidating technology resources accrued through years of acquisitions and global expansion.
“We’ve got all these wonderful subscriptions. They’re taking up real estate, they’re taking up addresses, they’re taking up storage, they’re taking up all of these things [and] some of that aren’t necessarily all required. It becomes a case of – and I’m just picking out the Australian region – there are definitely subscriptions that we could retire,” Jubb told iTnews.
Jubb said that, while the company is seeking to reduce its tech debt and excess cloud consumption, it is also about standardising its technology environments to allow them to accommodate more flexible and “boundaryless” global workforce designs.
“Case in point, we may want to make sure that we can pass work around … if it’s office hours in the [United States] after-hours for us.
“We want to make sure that we can do things in that follow the sun model, because we’ve got the scale, we’ve got the businesses running at that time,” Jubb explained.
Jubb conceded that governance restrictions would place some limits on the level of cloud consolidation that the company would be able to achieve operating within different global jurisdictions.
Observability tool consolidation
The cloud consolidation effort extends the group’s broader technology strategy to keep its global systems on a tighter leash, particularly around making them more observable.
For instance, the company has recently completed a large modernisation program which has seen it swap out a hodgepodge of smaller observability systems across the organisation in favour of Datadog’s SaaS-based monitoring and analytics platform.
Jubb told attendees that the consolidation enabled the company to reduce timeframes for developing incident post-mortems from weeks down to minutes.
That, said Jubb, is part of a broader remit to make the company more proactive to events across its systems rather than being reactive.
“This is one of those key pillars in the sense that we do want to make sure we can see what our systems are doing. In this case, we’re almost exclusively in the cloud, we want to make sure the clouds are doing what we think they are doing. And we want to have some level of not just reaction and expectation, but also proactive stances as well,” he said.
Centralised strategies
Establishing centralised technology strategies while maintaining local brand identities that comply with regulations within which they operate is a perennial challenge for companies that operate at global scales.
Flight Centre Group is no exception.
“It’s something that the business is still trying to find the balance on, particularly in terms of how they spread the global requirements, and the work, and the standards and pursue different things that can be effective in a global environment scale and all the time be true to their local roots.
“They’re trying to do that by keeping the businesses regional or country based and have a lot of that centralised in country, which helps obviously meeting the requirements of a foreign country. But at the same time [we’re] ensuring that we’ve got global standards that we’re working to,” Jubb said.
