AirAsia wins IDC Digital Transformation award

AirAsia was named Operating Model Master for Malaysia at the IDC Digital Transformation Awards (IDC DXa).

In a press statement, it said, the award honours companies that have enabled discernible and measurable excellence in their ability to make business operations more responsive and effective by leveraging digitally connected products/services, assets, people and trading partners.

AirAsia won the award for its deployment of Alibaba Cloud’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions to distinguish legitimate customers from crawlers and bots that negatively impacted bookings and revenue, and reduce massive traffic flows from bots that led to additional operational costs.

Using CDN in China, the airline was able to improve the latency and Round Trip Time (RTT) of airasia.com, and optimise traffic to the website based on user profiles.

AirAsia also worked with Alibaba security teams to block illicit traffic using an extensive database of known hackers and their patterns, before customising rules and applying them to the WAF.

The award was presented during the IDC Digital Transformation Summit 2018 held in Aloft Kuala Lumpur Sentral on Tuesday.

AirAsia Group chief information officer Declan Hogan said, “We tried many security tools, with limited success, prior to moving to Alibaba.

“Only Alibaba made a consistent, long-lasting impact, and they proved that they’re willing to take the risk to try it. And we appreciate that they were willing to make the investment to prove that they have the technology that
works.”

IDC DXa honours the achievements of organisations that have successfully planned and executed the digital transformation of one or multiple areas of their business through the application of digital and disruptive technologies.