A Hybrid Cloud Approach for the Cruise Industry

Ramon Millan, SVP & CIO, Carnival Corporation

In the cruise industry, where most of the data centers are on a ship, floating and moving, cloud services face the additional challenges of connectivity. A hybrid cloud approach is a suitable approach for the particularities of the cruise industry, since it allows placing our workloads and data where it makes more sense. Carnival Corporation has engaged in a journey to optimize its IT Infrastructure and through this process, we are integrating cloud computing, virtualization and consolidation of IT Infrastructure.

“In the cruise industry, where most of the data centers are on a ship, floating and moving, cloud services face the additional challenges of connectivity”

The Hybrid Cloud approach we are taking is helping our corporation reach the optimization levels we are looking for, since we have been able to identify some reduction of cost associated with the licensing, hosting, and expertise required to manage the product lifecycle. We expect the Hybrid Cloud is also going to help decrease deployment time for new applications and services, while at the same time also reduce the number of resources associated and cost.

Cloud computing offers advantages for business continuity and disaster recovery by eliminating many single points of failure associated with traditional on premise infrastructure. While also improving information security, as most cloud providers must follow industry standards associated with ISO, PCI and SOX certification. However, all this does not come without challenges and concerns and at the top of our list is Security and Privacy. In parallel to our optimization program we are reviewing, strengthening and evolving our IT Security model. The Hybrid Cloud approach and the IT Security Program are a few of the elements we have in place to mitigate the risks associated with the Cloud.

Another concern that we rank at the top of the list is the Network Bandwidth which is particularly critical for the shipboard IT services. Continuous access to the Cloud is difficult when the vessels are crossing the oceans and delivery of complex services is highly tough if the network capacity is insufficient.

As described before, Carnival Corporation has a number of areas where we currently leverage cloud services and infrastructure, while at the same time we continue to look for opportunities to expand our global capabilities and productivity. This includes application and infrastructure hosting for areas such as, service management, payroll, recruitment, employee training, application performance management, application load testing, video collaboration, and storage & compute hosting to name just a few areas. Over the next 12-24 months we expect to further expand our global Hybrid Cloud capabilities as part of our continuous IT Infrastructure Optimization program.