This month, Delta airlines, which is among the four big players in the US airline industry, was in the news – but not for a good reason. Delta had to scrap hundreds of flights and delay many others as it faced a major computer meltdown, turning attention to the difficulties that arise from the aged technology that is being used by several airline companies.
What went wrong with Delta?
A critical power control module at Delta’s Technology Command Center malfunctioned due to a transformer surge, leading to loss of power. As there were no backups for the critical systems and network equipment, the result was total instability in the system, which led to a major outage. Though computer system redundancy is a common thing, almost every company – especially those that have customer’s credit card data – need to spread out information (in some cases across different countries) so that their entire network does not go down in one fell swoop. Unfortunately for Delta, this was not the case.
According to technology experts, airlines spend heavily on new features like automated check-in kiosks, real-time luggage tracking, and fancy mobile apps. Yet many of them have failed to invest substantially in rebuilding their reservations systems from the ground up, which is clearly reflected in the Delta airlines fiasco. The meltdown shows how recent airline mergers in the United States have created four large domestic carriers that control almost 85 percent of the market, but rely on outdated data processing systems.
Delta, which merged with Northwest Airlines, has an antiquated system that, in spite of efforts to upgrade, was destined to fail miserably due to the simple reason that integrating older technologies with the latest systems is an extremely difficult task.
Are situations like the Delta meltdown avoidable?
The short answer is: absolutely. With high-quality and resilient systems, a reliable infrastructure can be built that can route power appropriately so as to avoid glitches. A reliable network infrastructure has features like disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA). High availability can be attained by running load balancers, which replicate themselves and avoid situations of service failures.
Additionally, hiring highly skilled developers to write more efficient code that ensures that software isn’t vulnerable to attacks such as SQL injection is a step in the right direction. Most importantly, there has to be appropriate attention given to quality control. Load tests and end-to-end tests shouldn’t be just an occasional occurrence, but should instead be done on a regular basis. Frequent testing not only prevents situations like the one Delta experienced, but also helps significantly reduce outage costs.
Finally, the Delta meltdown has brought to light the importance of using public cloud services to compensate for a lack of effective business continuity and disaster recovery systems.
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