Aviation has been particularly hard-hit by the covid-19 pandemic. Restrictions on travel and customer confidence saw passenger numbers at Edinburgh Airport, Scotland's busiest airport, drop by over 90%. Airports are complex, tech-rich environments with high security needs and IT estates which cover everything from Air Traffic Control towers and boarding card scanners to get you to Security to apps where you can pay for parking, or order food to your seat in the Departure Lounge.

We caught up with Alec Hodgson, Head of Digital at Edinburgh Airport,  and Berit Jimmink, Digital Product Manager at Edinburgh Airport, about how the cloud has enabled them to respond to passenger needs and given them freedom to experiment and innovate.

We also talk about building trust between Digital teams and IT operations in high-security environments, getting business buy-in for new digital initiatives and how the team used the lockdown period to develop innovative commercial digital products for the Airport.

Connect with Alec and Berit.

About the hosts

Aled Sage (VP Engineering at Cloudsoft) brings 20 years of experience developing distributed applications, mostly in the enterprise sector. Particular areas of interest include devops, automation, cloud, concurrency and distributed systems. Prior to joining Cloudsoft, Aled was Chief Architect at Enigmatec Corporation. He holds a PhD (Computer Science) from the University of St Andrews.

Connect with Aled

Alasdair Hodge (Principal Engineer and Solutions Architect at Cloudsoft) is a leading
authority in cloud, software applications and automation across all major cloud platforms, he has been engaged in the design and optimisation of cloud services in banking and finance and other service-based sectors such as telecoms, electronic design and supply-chain automation for over 12 years.

Connect with Alasdair

About Cloudsoft

Cloudsoft specialise in applications, automation and the cloud. Our top-down, application-centric approach is what sets us apart and empowers our customers to tame their IT estates and drive real business value.

Our public cloud IT transformation expertise is embedded our Tempo cloud services, helping our clients to transform faster and exploit the benefits of cloud. We’re an active contributor to the Apache Brooklyn open source project, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with Well-Architected, Microsoft Workloads, DevOps Competencies, a FinOps Foundation Member and a FinOps Certified Service Provider.

Our flagship AMP software is a Digital Platform Conductor, enabling customers in Banking, Defence and other heavily regulated industries to cut through the complexity of their estates. This maximises value from their technology investments, drives down costs and reduces risks. Cloudsoft AMP is the only product which strategically manages applications throughout their lifecycles across hybrid infrastructures, regardless of environment or location.

We're based in Edinburgh, UK, but work with clients around the world.