Cargolux Airlines International takes to the skies with business-critical Azure infrastructure

Flying with Microsoft Azure

In 2019, Chief Technology Officer Alfons Seesink joined the company to help design and drive a major migration for the complex IT infrastructure required to keep all that freight moving smoothly. At the time, Cargolux operated on an outsourced environment, built mainly around Windows virtual machines in a third-party datacenter. The business was evolving, customers were moving forward, and Cargolux needed to adapt and transform if its IT was to continue supporting business growth and help Cargolux maintain a leadership position in the air cargo industry. “At that point, ’The Program,’ as we call it, had begun,” Alfons Seesink says. “The team had one year to lift and shift approximately 250 virtual machines running business-critical applications and services into the cloud. Cargolux chose Microsoft Azure to keep the lift and shift as simple and straightforward as possible.” Cargolux also extended the Azure-led transformation by migrating an on-premises Microsoft Exchange deployment to Microsoft 365, the cornerstone of a broad communications and collaboration overhaul.

The transformation is well underway. Alfons Seesink says, “It’s three years into The Program now. In 2019, we migrated to a complete Azure network infrastructure that provides a highly secure platform for all our workloads. We are fully cloud-based and fully in Azure for all but a few legacy on-premises apps for which the migration is still in progress.”

The moving process: No airplanes required

Alfons Seesink used Azure Site Recovery to migrate servers from the managed datacenter to Azure. “We calculated the required Azure compute units, shifted to Azure virtual machines, then transitioned to Azure resources to serve business applications,” he says. Cargolux uses scalable Azure Virtual Machines served by Azure Storage for a more efficient, dynamic infrastructure that would be more responsive to the latest business requirements. The virtual machines ingest data from a variety of storage media, from Azure Standard HDD to Azure Ultra Disk Storage depending on workload requirements. He continues, “We were using a Citrix-hosted, on-premises environment, and we were to recreate that same environment in Azure, via the Citrix Cloud, so we gain the efficiency and performance of the apps and services running side by side in the cloud.” Currently, Cargolux has approximately 11 business-critical applications running on Azure, supporting flight operations, airplane maintenance, cargo management, and finance. It also runs about 100 supporting applications on Azure, along with virtual machines supporting in-house development and testing.

The migration from outsourced, managed IT to Azure infrastructure operated in-house has not only benefited business operations but also transformed application and service development at Cargolux. The company now uses agile practices in Azure DevOps for in-house development. Says Alfons Seesink, “We can work from scripted development, testing, user acceptance, and validation through to production procedures without manual intervention.” Cargolux developers can create and decommission resources on demand using scripted templates, which makes it far easier, quicker, and more cost effective to create development and preproduction test environments as part of the agile development life cycle.

The company still has some longstanding services, including on-premises software, that remain to be moved to the cloud, and it considers Azure interoperability offerings like Azure ExpressRoute crucial for operating in that hybrid environment. Alfons Seesink says, “We have a huge workload in Azure, but for some services that have not yet been migrated, such as SAP servers running on-premises, we have directly connected them using Azure ExpressRoute in a responsive, fully federated, and highly secure environment.”

Reaching Zero Trust with Microsoft Security

For Cargolux, that last point about creating a secure environment is particularly important—for employees as well as for internal and customer data both at rest and in transit. “Once you put your workloads into Azure, you’re not done,” says Alfons Seesink. “You need to build toward Zero Trust. Microsoft Security provides all the materials you need, but you must put them in place.”

Alfons Seesink notes that making the most of those materials offered by Microsoft Security requires a new way of thinking, particularly for a company that previously delegated much of that work to a managed provider. Microsoft Security is a suite of products providing comprehensive platform-wide, on-premises, and in-the-cloud protection. “It’s a learning experience for our staff, and it requires organizational change beyond the IT department to fully embrace end-to-end security in a cloud environment,” he says. “We’ve redesigned our network infrastructure to facilitate strong, platform-based security products in Microsoft Security to better protect our critical workloads.”

Among those security solutions adopted by Cargolux are Microsoft Defender for Endpoint for employee devices and on-premises workflows and Defender for Cloud for protecting cloud and hybrid apps and services. Cargolux uses Microsoft Sentinel to orchestrate and monitor overall security operations. “We have Microsoft Sentinel running in the background, collecting logs and running workbooks, coordinating triggers and responses to help prevent security issues from arising in the first place, and providing immediate response in case they do,” says Alfons Seesink.

Using new infrastructure to support fast, effective COVID-19 response

Alfons Seesink cites the crucial role played by Cargolux in helping facilitate required logistics during the COVID-19 pandemic as evidence of the benefits of a modern, responsive, cloud-based IT service. With passenger flights severely reduced, spare cargo capacity in those airplanes was now unavailable. At the same time, massive medical equipment and supplies needed to be moved internationally, and Cargolux went into action.

“The Azure architecture we had put in place turned out to be central in facilitating coordination of the COVID-19 response effort from around 50 offices internationally,” Alfons Seesink says. “I take pride in our IT department that we were able to do such a tremendous job at such short notice.”

Transformation advice: Walk, don’t run

Cargolux now has a much more agile and adaptive IT environment, with a high degree of automation and programmatic control over platform resources. Alfons Seesink says, “The platform as a code service in Azure makes provisioning far easier. For example, we have sets of configuration templates, so it takes our Azure architects only about 10 to 15 minutes to have a fully configured virtual machine in place because the whole process is done by code, not by hand.”

And it’s a more connected environment, helping to not only bring the company together but also to connect it more closely with its customers. Cargolux can expose services programmatically through published APIs using Azure API Management to offer safeguarded customer access for highly secure, fast, automated transactions. “Through Azure API Management, we can provide direct API connection to our environment for customer systems so that they can do direct bookings on the spot,” says Alfons Seesink. “It’s opened up a new world in helping customers get their cargo onto our planes.”

The Cargolux transformation is ongoing, and Alfons Seesink regards it as a steady walk forward together with Microsoft, rather than a sprint toward a finish line. “If we keep working closely together, we will manage to go the extra mile and achieve where we want to be,” he says. And it’s working for Cargolux. “When receiving feedback from our business, I hear about increased performance, increased uptime, and improved stability. Those are the outcomes we look for, and hearing that is a true satisfaction for our department. We know our Azure infrastructure is always there, and it’s always working for us!”

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