From its modest origins as a regional carrier to its current position as the fifth-largest airline in the United States, Alaska Airlines has flourished due to its steadfast dedication to customer satisfaction, a corporate culture that fosters innovation, and strategic collaborations in vital areas like sustainability.

For Alaska Airlines, its mission extends beyond takeoff and landing. The aim is to offer a comprehensive service for travelers that ensures a smooth journey from ticket purchase to baggage claim, utilizing technologies such as Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Defender, and GitHub to facilitate this process.

“We are always exploring how to implement new technologies or improve existing processes with technology,” explains Vikram Baskaran, the vice president of information technology services at Alaska Airlines. “Applying these principles has been crucial to our success as a leader in the aviation industry.”

As cybersecurity threats become more prevalent and sophisticated, Microsoft Defender plays a vital role in Alaska’s IT framework, enabling the airline to continue serving its passengers during attacks that can lead to global outages and the grounding of thousands of flights.

Microsoft Source recently interviewed Baskaran about Alaska’s technological strategies, its resilience against cyber threats, and how the company envisions its technology portfolio evolving in the coming years.

It all begins with our primary mission: to create an airline that people love. Our technology investments are aligned with this goal, focusing on how we can safely transport guests from their departure points to their destinations while providing exceptional customer service and maintaining a strong on-time performance. Our infrastructure must be operational 24/7, and we are intentional in ensuring that all our technology investments align with this requirement.

We view our operations through two main platforms: our own data centers for critical workloads and the Microsoft Azure Cloud for additional support. We began utilizing Azure about a decade ago and have been systematically migrating workloads from our data centers to the cloud. We invest in both platforms and prioritize strong partnerships, like our collaboration with Microsoft, to support the technology we select.

Much of this begins with our planning process. We ensure that our core team—dispatchers, systems operations control, pilots, and airport staff—has processes designed for resilience. We collaborate with partners like Microsoft to architect effective solutions using the Azure Cloud. Microsoft Azure architects have worked alongside our team throughout the development process.

We maintain continuous communication with partners like Microsoft to gather insights that enhance the resilience of our products throughout the entire journey. By the time our solutions are ready for testing, much of the resilience is already integrated into the technology. When incidents occur, we are prepared, with a well-established playbook for swiftly restoring services.

Hope is not a strategy. Airlines operate with extreme complexity, requiring us to be deliberate about how we address our systems. We have response plans that examine the underlying architecture, enabling us to quickly determine when to restart specific processes or activate disaster recovery plans. We also consider the reactive side to ensure we have effective responses to complement our proactive measures. Together, these strategies ensure that we maintain resilience as an airline.