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The step into the cloud ensures that the website of Nuremberg Airport can even with unusual happenings scale quickly and easily by increasing the available hardware resources.

Nuremberg Airport ranges amongst the top ten commercial airports in Germany, serving about 4.2 million passengers and handling about 100.000 tons of air cargo each year. In 2010 it again won the Business Traveller Award as „Best German Airport“.

Website, CMS and WebCRM in the Cloud

In May 2011 Nuremberg Airport commissioned Infopark AG to reconceptualize and relaunch its website. Since then Nuremberg Airport uses Infopark Cloud Express with CMS and WebCRM for its website. In addition to a more contemporary design, the website is now better fitted to the needs of the different target audiences of the airport. Also new are lots of dynamic features and applications, for example the online reservation for parking spaces.

Christian Käser, head of business development & new media management, stresses the extent of the services offered online: „We are always keen to provide visitors of our website with relevant information regarding their trip, almost as if they could take off online.“

Motivation and Background

Business relations between Flughafen Nürnberg GmbH and Infopark AG began in 2009. In August 2010 the marketing department at Nuremberg Airport decided to reframe the web strategy and subsequently issued an invitation to bid.

Management in conjunction with the departments aviation, technics, marketing & business development and communication & environment decided on the requirements of the new website. The hosting of web applications was not seen as a core competence of Nuremberg Airport’s IT department. Therefore a sample calculation for internal and external hosting was carried out. Infopark’s suggestion for a Cloud architecture initially led to internal discussions.

But management and the different departments involved reached the decision to employ the advanced Cloud solution. Important factors like dynamic scalability and solid budgeting are a lot easier to offer for an external agency. With regards to contents the focus was on the marketing of additional services the airport offers and to make visitors come back regularly to use these services.

The project kicked-off on January 17th 2011 and the website was relaunched on May 2nd 2001. Since then the website is live and is being continuously developed further.

Internal Challenges

Reservations towards a plattform based solution resulted from the fact that the complex system architecture is not run in-house unlike earlier web projects where systems had a strong monolithic character. Nuremberg Airport also had concerns regarding the hosting at Amazon Web Services abroad and especially regarding legal security. However, it was made sure that legal security is in compliance with EU law and the Federal Data Protection Act and Amazon warranted that data will only be stored on servers within the EU.

Remaining questions were cleared up in a joint workshop, a demand analysis and the development of a concept for the Cloud. Experts from the departments involved invested a lot of time to actively carry out the demand analysis. Also the management of Nuremberg Airport supported the analysis actively by clearing the expenditures for the workshop and a phase for conceptualization.

Components of the Cloud Solution

The relaunch of Nuremberg Airport’s website was carried out with the Infopark Cloud Express, comprised of an Enterprise Content Management System (ECMS), a WebCRM (Web Customer Relationship Management) and an Elastic Web Platform. The project was implemented on the basis of Platform as a Service provided by Infopark and is run in the Public Cloud on Amazon Web Services. For the web application framework Ruby on Rails was chosen, which effectively supports the requirements of a modern, dynamic website and agile software development. Infopark Cloud Express is based on Amazon Web Services (EC2/ELB/S3/CloudFront) as Infrastructure as a Service, making Infopark the first company in Europe to offer this service as Platform as a Service.

The WebCRM offers Nuremberg Airport the perfect integration of portal functionality, customer relationship management and online-marketing. It also includes a powerful newsletter tool and an events- and requests management tool.

Technical Implementation and Data Security

Interfaces with third-party suppliers proved to be technically challenging. This is especially valid for flight schedules including seasonal flight schedules and direct and connecting flights from Nuremberg Airport. These data are regularly retrieved through interfaces with the OAG Aviation data base of United Business Media Ltd. Further interfaces had to be set up for the implementation of the parking space reservation service using XML-webs ervice by PMT Solutions AG and many more features like weather data and SMS&Fly. The implementation of Cloud services was carried out almost exclusively using web services interfaces with data and applications of the airport.

Furthermore a mobile website was conceptualized and implemented by Infopark.

The technical and administrative measures for data security are in compliance with the requirements of §9 and §11 of the Federal Data Protection Act.

How Businesses Benefit through the Cloud

Reliability During Peaks in Demand

Airports in particular are faced with hardly predictable access rates on their websites. Extreme weather conditions, strikes or ash clouds can lead to very high access rates and this is where the scalability of the Cloud architecture comes into play. Other advantages of hosting in the Cloud are the high availability and reliability. This way Nuremberg Airport can inform the public independently from their own IT infrastructure.

Reduced Workload for the IT Department

Employing Infrastructure as a Service reduces procurement costs for hardware which always has to be tailored to the specific demands of the software development company. This means that speed restrictions of individual components and manufacturer-specific requirements for the hardware do not apply anymore. If more engines are needed they can be employed on-demand which further reduces hardware costs.

Hosting in the Cloud also minimizes costs for the maintenance of the software by the IT department. Updates to Infopark Cloud Express are regularly uploaded by Infopark which renders trainings of Nuremberg Airport’s staff unnecessary.

More Efficiency for Nuremberg Airport’s Departments

The reliability of Cloud hosting means the departments in question can focus more on contents and functionality. Thanks to the Elastic Web Platform it is easy and fast to build and maintain several websites for different marketing operations (microsites, brandsites etc.) which leads to further cost reductions.

Centralization of Services

The one-stop-shop concept means that there is no need to contract external agencies, making work for developers a lot easier.

Reduction of Costs

• For a medium-sized company with strong competition and high cost pressure like Flughafen Nürnberg GmbH, licensing costs in the range of five-digit figures are just not feasible. Increasingly operating an up-to-date and powerful Enterprise Content Management System in combination with a highly dynamic website is only cost-efficient if run in the Cloud environment.

• Cloud hosting helps reducing costs whilst at the same time keeping dynamic scalability. A comparable infrastructure would involve high investment costs and a large part of the resources would not be used for most of the time.

• Nuremberg Airport uses a complex state-of-the-art architecture at a highly competitive price and does not have to start from scratch any time it wants to carry out a new web project. The complete development environment is provided by the Elastic Platform on-demand.

• Even before the project’s kick-off it was clear that the development environment has to meet high requirements (implementation of third-party-services, rails applications, testing, monitoring). The Elastic Web Platform was the perfect solution and by employing Platform as a Service, developing was sped up and mistakes were minimized.

• Nuremberg Airport’s IT department does not have to be trained to install and configure the services in the development environment.

The Project Team

To implement the project Infopark deployed a team leader and four additional developers. Nuremberg Airport’s staff supporting the project were comprised of two online editors from the marketing department, a technical consultant from the IT departement, a member of the communications department and a member of passenger services departement.