Ryanair Soars to New Heights with Modern Data Platform in the Cloud

Founded in 1985, Irish airline Ryanair is now Europe’s largest airline group, with more than 2,400 daily flights from 82 bases and a fleet of over 470 aircraft. Ryanair faced the challenge of managing a rapidly expanding IT laundry list. With over 80 sources and 70TB of data to manage – with more data added daily – Ryanair needed a solution that could manage the complexity of its customer data and could scale as the airline continued to grow.  

Ryanair’s legacy systems struggled to keep up with its growth. The volume of transactions and data meant that existing systems couldn’t keep up. Additionally, maintaining physical IT infrastructure was draining resources. 

The airline understood that to deliver high-performance, flexible data control, it needed to move its management solution to the cloud. To do that, Microsoft Azure was selected as its partner. However, recognising the limitations of its in-house Azure knowledge, Ryanair turned to us to help navigate the pitfalls of cloud migration. As a Microsoft Gold Partner in Data Analytics and Cloud Platform, we have a huge amount of experience building scalable, efficient big data platforms on Microsoft Azure. We ensured the necessary pre-flight checks were ticked off before takeoff.

We worked closely with Ryanair to assess its needs and recommend an optimal cloud software combination. Together, we developed a comprehensive migration plan that minimised disruption and ensured critical systems remained operational. Azure Data Factory managed data from multiple sources, while Azure Data Lake was pressed into service as Ryanair’s big data store. Finally, Azure Synapse Analytics was utilised as an Enterprise Data Warehouse that would serve its customer-facing applications and deliver business-focused reports to zero in on business KPIs. 

Ryanair’s cloud migration has been a resounding success. The airline now enjoy the benefits of on-demand scalability, allowing it to rapidly meet fluctuating customer demand. The IT team is free from the burden of physical infrastructure management, which enables the team to focus on innovation and delivering customer-centric features. In addition, enhanced security gives the brand new-found piece of mind.   

Outcomes

• Designed and implemented a scalable big data platform on Microsoft Azure. 
• Built data ingestion pipelines using Azure Data Factory. 
• Leveraged Azure Data Lake for a centralised data store. 
• Integrated Azure Synapse Analytics for enterprise-grade data warehousing. 
• Ensured scalability and flexibility to meet Ryanair’s evolving needs. 

Version 1 came highly recommended by Microsoft due to their status and reputation as a skilled Gold Partner in the Data & Analytics space. The highly experienced team immediately recognised our challenges, so we were confident they could accelerate the delivery of a robust modern data platform in Microsoft Azure. From the outset, Version 1 became an extension of our team, going above and beyond to deliver this crucial project, even taking the time to upskill our team to ensure we continue to get the most out of the platform.