Garuda Indonesia is the national flag carrier of Indonesia, seamlessly connecting more than 64 destinations worldwide to not only one of the largest economies in Southeast Asia, but also an array of exotic destinations in the beautiful archipelago of Indonesia all at once. Garuda Indonesia proudly serves its passengers with the award-winning "Garuda Indonesia Experience" service, which highlights the warm Indonesian hospitality and rich diverse culture. The airline continuously strives through its ongoing transformation program to provide better and even more convenient services. The achievement of Garuda Indonesia’s transformation program can be seen from global recognition a Skytrax’s 5-star airline rating since 2014, ranked as Top 10 Worlds Best airline in the world, as well as winning the prestigious "“The World’s Best Cabin Crew"” award for five consecutive years from 2014. To complement the Skytrax Awards, Garuda Indonesia also awarded the "5-Stars Airline" recognition from the Airline Passenger Experience Association (APEX), a non-profit association for enhanced passenger flight experience based in New York, USA. In 2020, Garuda Indonesia was also named as one of the best world airlines in health safety protocol implementation during pandemic situation according to Safe Travel Barometer - an independent institution that assesses health and safety protocol implementation standards of world airlines amid COVID-19 prevention.

The Covid-19 pandemic has put the aviation industry at its lowest point throughout history. International Air Transport Association (IATA) announced full-year global passenger traffic results for 2020 showing that demand fell by 65.9% compared to the full year of 2019, by far the sharpest traffic decline in aviation history. As many experts predict that the air transport industry will still have to face challenges brought by the pandemic, the aviation industry is expected to be more resilient and agile to adapt to the changes in customer behavior especially in adapting to the new normal, one of which is by implementing the right technology. This implementation is expected to not only facilitate a smooth and pleasant customer experience but also to reduce their operational cost. It is undeniable that the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly accelerated the adoption of contactless technology, one of which is by strengthening digital assets from the airline's corporate website, mobile booking and ticketing application, API management, back-office application, and other services to minimize the spread of viruses and reduce the interaction between passengers and staff.

During today’s challenging situation, the ability to adapt to meet customer needs is a must. Through the partnership between Garuda Indonesia and Alibaba Cloud, Garuda migrated its core operation applications, including corporate websites, mobile booking & ticketing applications, API Management, cargo websites, and many more, to Alibaba Cloud. This collaboration is expected to support Garuda Indonesia’s effort in implementing a cost-efficiency strategy with the support of information technology, especially cloud technology.

During the migration, Indosat Ooredoo provided the network backbone design and implementation, while ViBiCloud provided the migration support with project management capability, and supported the migrated environments through ViBiCloud Managed Services. Through this cooperation, Garuda Indonesia managed to migrate over 85 VMs and 3 databases to Alibaba Cloud within 2 weeks with all the team working remotely due to the Covid-19 situation, with minimum business disruption. Using Alibaba Cloud Migration service (ACM) and Database Transmission Service (DTS), all Virtual Machines and PaaS Databases were synchronized by the ViBiCloud team from source cloud to Alibaba Cloud. After completing the synchronization process, modifications in the application layer to access/connect to new databases were made. Supporting features such as Server Load Balancers (SLBs) and Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections were then deployed. With Alibaba Cloud, Garuda Indonesia managed to reduce network latency by almost 20%. In the event of application release, deployment, operation, and mentoring, the range of time for upload is much shorter and it makes the team more effective.