Airlines Reporting Corporation Accelerates its Speed-to-Market and Data Performance on AWS

As a data product and service provider to travel agencies and airlines, Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC)’s mission is to leverage technology and data to drive innovation and advance global air travel. "Technology is critical to our industry given how quickly the travel industry is evolving," says Mostafa Ghazi, senior database administrator at ARC. “We think of ourselves as a technology company and constantly try to improve our technology presence so that we can deliver data faster, more efficiently, and more securely to end users across different platforms.”

ARC recently began building a cloud-focused transformation strategy to drive better data performance and solutions. The company started its transformation effort by building its future-state architecture on AWS. The first step for ARC was an extensive evaluation of cloud-based enterprise data warehousing solutions that could improve on its on-premises data warehouse performance and scalability, increase its speed-to-market when new data product ideas arise, and better track its costs. The company found everything it needed for its current and future state development with Snowflake, an enterprise data warehouse solution built for the cloud.

“We went through our requirements and found that Snowflake's solution checked every box and more," says Ghazi. "Snowflake provides us with the ability to separate workloads on different compute nodes, which proved significant for us given the impact on performance improvement. We were also very impressed by Snowflake's Zero-Copy cloning feature that allows us to take an entire database and copy it in a matter of milliseconds. That feature would prove crucial in helping us increase our development efforts and speed-to-market pace. Snowflake could also provide us with the ability to do granular cost tracking.” Given the nature of the data ARC manages, the company sought to avoid traversing the public internet as it implemented its new data warehouse using Snowflake on AWS. 

ARC is an ISO 27001-certified company and handles sensitive data, including credit card information, through its settlement processes. The ARC team began its Snowflake migration knowing they needed a way to connect Snowflake accounts to AWS resources without traversing the public internet. “Data privacy is something we take very seriously,” says Ghazi. “As we transform our technology, we need to ensure we can comply with all of our data privacy and security requirements."

Snowflake's solution incorporates AWS PrivateLink, a service that provides private connectivity between VPCs, AWS services, and on-premises applications securely on the AWS network to meet ARC's stringent data requirements. AWS PrivateLink enables software-as-a-service providers like Snowflake to offer services that look and feel like they are hosted directly on a private network. By using AWS PrivateLink, ARC can migrate its data warehousing capabilities to AWS in a highly scalable, available, and secure manner. “Thanks to AWS PrivateLink, our performance isn’t limited to the available internet pipe bandwidth. We are confident our traffic remains secure and compliant with regulations,” says Ghazi. 

Using Snowflake on AWS, ARC has driven cost savings of 30 percent. The company experienced 50 percent faster delivery times for customers requesting reports. Additionally, ARC has seen an increase in its speed-to-market and customization capabilities.

ARC is moving to Snowflake and AWS in phases while redesigning its data model to fit future needs. The company anticipates being 100 percent deployed on Snowflake by 2020 and its future-state plan is to have all of its systems and resources on AWS. ARC just launched a data lake on AWS using Snowflake and AWS services including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and AWS Glue. “We want to transform our data with a robust data lake to meet our business needs,” says Ghazi. “Knowing we have a service such as AWS PrivateLink to use as we continue to transform our technology footprint provides us with ongoing confidence and peace of mind.”