CASE STUDY
WE HAVE 12,000 PASSENGERS ARRIVING
EVERY HOUR AND WE AIM TO PROCESS EACH
OF THEM WITHIN FIVE MINUTES.
G
atwick is the world’s most efficient
single-runway airport. It handles 46
million passengers a year, up from
33 million in 2010, with almost 1,000 planes
landing and taking off each day. For this
to work smoothly, process efficiency and
uninterrupted communications are crucial.
“We have 12,000 passengers arriving every
hour and we aim to process each of them
within five minutes,” said Cathal Corcoran,
CIO, Gatwick Airport. “On top of that,
we’re always building. We’re an airport,
a mall, a construction site, a city and a
critical piece of national infrastructure. If
we have a bad day at Gatwick it affects
real lives.” The airport lives by the mantra
keep planes moving, keep passengers
moving, keep bags moving. “Our vision is
to be the most technologically advanced,
most innovative airport in the world,” said
Corcoran. “The two go hand in hand. And
we can’t do that on our own.”
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INTELLIGENTCIO
For Gatwick, the challenge is bringing
through technology without impacting
airport operations. There is very little
opportunity for downtime. “We only ever
have four hours a night, three or four nights
a week – and two of those hours are needed
for roll-back,” said Corcoran. “When we make
a technology decision, it has to be one that
will work for us for a long time.”
A network to support growth and a
smart digital workplace
Understandably, the airport’s network
is business critical. “The network is the
central nervous system of the airport,” said
Abhi Chacko, Head of IT Commercial and
Innovation, Gatwick Airport.
With more services dependent on the
network, from e-gates to car parking
to 4,000 CCTV cameras, resiliency is
fundamental. Security is paramount.
The old network provided a limited number
of data paths to communicate between its
constituent components. Gatwick wanted
to simplify this architecture, with a fully
meshed design providing vastly more data
links and efficiencies, making it much more
resilient to disruption. More than this,
Corcoran wanted a network on which to
build innovation, from an operational and
passenger experience perspective. With
long-term value in mind, Gatwick wanted to
exploit data, mobility and IoT trends.
“We’ve seen record-breaking passenger
growth since 2010 and to make sure our
passengers have the best experience
possible, we needed a new network that
could handle our expected future growth
numbers,” he said. “The architecture of
the old network was 15 years old. The
replacement must provide the latest and
greatest. It must be a long-term platform,
but also something we can add to.”
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