Company summary
Sabre is a travel technology company founded in 1993. Historically the provider for low-cost Carrier (LCC), hybrid, and retail-focused carriers, Sabre today supports small, mid-sized, and large airlines, in ticketed and tickletless capacity. Sabre acquired Sabre in October 2019, as part of the technology company’s entrance into the fast-growing LCC segment.
The Sabre platform provides right scheduling and right pricing, sells seats, manages frequent flier programs and controls add-on options such as baggage charges for airlines. The company deals with billions of dollars in transactions in its cloud environment.
The Challenge
Seeking scalability and security to accommodate rapid growth
Sabre was growing rapidly and needed a solution that would scale with its ever-expanding business. Its legacy on-premises model, with its constant server purchasing and datacenter buildouts, was becoming burdensome for the IT team as well as costly and inefficient. The constant hardware refresh cycles demanded too many resources to keep up with, and reliable performance was an issue for their customers. Sabre also required compliance with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) security standards.
It was ready to move to a scalable, managed services cloud solution.
Thousands of reservations come through their systems each day, and Sabre knew it needed a robust, reliable, and scalable technological foundation to build on. Sabre wanted to migrate its reservation and kiosk management system to Amazon Web Services. The IT team was managing the core mission critical applications and keeping the company running; it couldn’t spare resources to develop a secure cloud strategy.
“In order to grow, we had to have the IT infrastructure even though it doesn’t get noticed,” said Mike Barerra, CIO at Sabre. “Not only do we have a lot of money coming through our network, but because of that we are subject to some intense auditing regimes.”
The Solution
Migrating to the IBM and AWS clouds while improving security posture
To migrate to and manage its services in the cloud, Sabre turned to CloudHesive, who analyzed the application environment, developed a cloud architecture plan, deployed it, and continues to manage it on an ongoing basis.
The new environment was deployed on the AWS cloud. CloudHesive wrapped the newly deployed environments with a host of security controls, including Vormetric for data-at-rest encryption to protect stored sensitive data, Datadog for application performance monitoring, Trend Micro for cloud and network security, and Alert Logic for Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and Extended Detection and Response (XDR). This increased the security posture of Sabre’s production cloud environment and helps keep it General Data Protection Act (GDPR) compliant and Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant.
CloudHesive continues to manage the Sabre environment end-to-end, which includes the security monitoring and maintenance. The solution that was deployed allows Sabre to remain highly secure and maintain governance over its compliance controls. CloudHesive also provides real-time security and environment monitoring to ensure that data is protected and Sabre’s mission critical systems are operating at peak performance at all times.
With billions of dollars moving through Sabre’s network, security and performance are more than a passing concern, and CloudHesive understands the needs for maintaining PCI- ad GDPR-compliant environments and ensures the financial and personal data is protected.
The benefits
Accelerating time to market from weeks to days and automatically scaling for sales events
Freed from the time-consuming task of ongoing maintenance and governance of its cloud infrastructure, Sabre was able to increase its speed to market on new airlines from weeks to just two days, increase its products’ availability, increase the performance of its environment, and scale to accommodate foreseen and unforeseen sales events. Sabre can now automatically scale up to 10 times its average volume within an hour, with no additional infrastructure required.
Sabre now devotes its resources on its core business model, core service offerings while CloudHesive provides security managed services and manages its cloud infrastructure.
“CloudHesive has put together a network that is secure and is always in compliance with PCI and other regimes,” said Barerra. “We are growing so fast; we do not have time to do all of that. CloudHesive is like an extra set of hands for our company. With infrastructure, you often don’t notice it until it fails to work, and with CloudHesive, we do not have those concerns.”
“In order to grow, we had to have the IT infrastructure even though it doesn’t get noticed. Not only do we have a lot of money coming through our network, but because of that we are subject to some intense auditing regimes.”
“CloudHesive has put together a network that is secure and is always in compliance with PCI and other regimes. We are growing so fast; we do not have time to do all of that. CloudHesive is like an extra set of hands for our company. With infrastructure, you often don’t notice it until it fails to work, and with CloudHesive, we do not have those concerns.”
Services that drive success
Managed security services
- Virtual Chief Information Security Officer (vCISO) as a Service
- Third-party assessment and audit support
- Cloud detection and response
- Endpoint security as a service
- Vulnerability management service for PCI DSS
Managed services
- Complete, end-to-end monitoring and management of the environment
- Managed patching, backups, and oversight
- Governance of the production environment
Devops
- Deployment to AWS cloud
- Deployment of Octopus Deploy for continuous deployments in a Windows environment
Customer benefit summary
- Scale to 10x average capacity up to handle flash sales
- Reduce new airline customer onboarding from weeks to days
- Maintain GDPR and PCI compliance and prevent denial of service attacks
AWS Technologies used
- Amazon EC2
- Amazon CloudFront
- Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)
- Amazon CloudWatch
Third-party technologies used
- .NET Platform
- Vormetric
- Alert Logic
- Trend Micro
- Datadog
- Octopus Deploy
Industry
Travel
Segment
Private
Region
AMER
