Bangkok Flight Services Achieves 50% Reduction in IT Infrastructure Management Time on AWS, Paving the Way for Next-Gen Technologies

Bangkok Flight Services (BFS) is a modern, innovative, and customer-focused ground handling company at Bangkok Suvarnabhumi Airport, jointly owned by Bangkok Airways and Worldwide Flight Services (WFS). It offers full passenger, ramp, and cargo handling services, ensuring 99 percent on-time performance for around 77,000 flights annually at Thailand's main airport.

Each year, approximately 60 million passengers arrive at Bangkok Suvarnabhumi Airport, with 90 million more expected in the near future due to airport expansion. BFS knew that such substantial passenger growth would stress its cargo handling operations, currently housed in an on-premises data center with aging hardware and lacking a disaster recovery (DR) facility. Fiaz Idris, head of IT at Bangkok Flight Services, says, "Initially, our focus was on establishing a cloud-based DR site. However, we realized that a complete lift-and-shift of our data center to the cloud, inclusive of DR capabilities, might be a more viable option."

Upon evaluating several cloud providers for its cargo handling applications, BFS chose Amazon Web Services (AWS). Instrumental in this decision was advice from WFS, which had already migrated its systems in Europe and U.S. to AWS. Fiaz explains, "After learning about WFS's positive experience with AWS and finding AWS documentation readily available and easy to understand, we believed AWS was the right choice."

When BFS sought an expert who could support its data center’s migration to the cloud, the local AWS team recommended AWS Partner DailiTech, whose AWS accreditations include Advanced Migration Consulting Competency, the result of a solid track record for successful large-scale migrations to AWS. To ensure best practices, DailiTech ran a Migration Readiness Assessment to understand the preparedness of BFS’s applications for cloud migration. These findings were used to prepare a migration strategy and create a plan BFS could review and sign off on. “We were impressed by the professionalism of the DailiTech team and its expertise,” recalls Fiaz.

As part of its strategy, DailiTech included the AWS Application Migration Service, which expedites cloud migrations and mitigates the risk of errors inherent in manual migrations. To execute the switchover, DailiTech configured the migration service settings and conducted a series of non-disruptive tests by running BFS systems on AWS. The entire migration process, from initial discussions to going live on AWS, spanned seven months, with no rollback required. “There were no issues, and, more importantly, no disruption to our operations, thanks to DailiTech,” says Fiaz.

BFS migrated all its custom-built applications to AWS, including cargo and inventory management system, passenger and ramp management applications, rostering, procurement, contract, and document management applications. In each case, BFS ran the applications and its databases on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provides BFS’s object storage, AWS CloudTrail tracks user activity, and Amazon CloudWatch monitors applications as part of BFS’s cloud defenses.

Since migrating to AWS, BFS has seen IT Infrastructure management time decrease by 50 percent. “With AWS, we experience seamless server management—it allows us to start up servers whenever we need, without the hassle of pre-planning or resource allocation limitations. This flexibility makes it significantly easier to launch and scale servers compared to managing an on-premises infrastructure,” comments Fiaz. The company also has DR capability with systems hosted in multiple Availability Zones to ensure business continuity in the event of an issue in one zone. In addition, BFS has eliminated downtime—a constant worry due to its unpredictability, even though it only occurred for about an hour once per year.

With passenger numbers at Bangkok Suvarnabhumi Airport expected to more than double, leaders at BFS are confident that the company can seamlessly scale its systems as business increases. Meanwhile, personnel have the support they need to maintain their current 99 percent on-time performance. “With AWS, we can stay focused on delivering great customer service,” says Fiaz.

Furthermore, spending less time on management means BFS’s IT personnel can concentrate more on innovation and improving services. Recently, the team resolved issues with an e-filing system that had been frustrating staff. Previously, the system frequently hit storage limits, preventing personnel from uploading more documents until extra capacity was added. However, the implementation of Amazon S3 storage has added fine-grained control over the storage space, enabling the effective tagging and management of files. "Using our freed-up time, we developed applications that directly upload to Amazon S3 buckets, effectively allowing unlimited uploads," explains Fiaz.

The migration is the first step in a journey toward a modernized, cloud-native infrastructure that will make use of Internet of Things (IoT) technology and artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance operations. Fiaz sees multiple use cases for AI and IoT that could improve the level of customer service, including generative AI–powered chatbots to support customer services or IoT-enabled wheelchairs that staff can track to ensure they’re delivered to passengers as quickly as possible. “Migrating to AWS means future-proofing our IT and creating great new opportunities for Bangkok Flight Services to take services to a new level with next-generation technologies,” he concludes.