“Our corporate travel technology system makes it easy for big organisations to manage all their travel needs themselves in a single place,” explains Barry Painting, the group’s CIO. This includes their flight, car, hotel, transfer, forex, and more in a single online booking platform. “By putting the widest choice of travel options directly in the customer’s hands, we give the customer the power of choice and ensure significant travel savings, all the while ensuring that corporate policies are followed.”

While TravelIT prides itself on the seamless user experience, ensuring that this happens means having the correct people – and doing a lot of heavy IT lifting. TravelIT integrates into each client’s ERP system and creates a profile for every employee. This information includes loyalty programme details, dietary requirements, booking thresholds (for example, can the employee travel in business class? How much can they spend on a hotel room?) and, most importantly, personal information subject to POPIA and GDPR requirements.

“This is the most sensitive information we have,” says Painting matter-of-factly. It goes without saying that security is a massive deal for the company. “When tendering for government and corporate client business, there’s a very stringent set of security requirements that an organisation needs to adhere to. We need to prove that we have a multi-layered security framework that protects our customers’ data,” he explains. “We chose Microsoft Azure partly because of all its advanced security features.”

“Moving TravelIT to Azure was made easier by the way they had constructed their travel platform using existing Microsoft products,” explains BUI’s Cloud Solutions Architect, Johnson Sheng. “Completing the move to Azure will save TravelIT more money. And it will dramatically increase their resilience, redundancy and efficiency.” Of course, this is all easier said than done. Which is why the modernisation project has been split into three phases:

First, BUI will assist in moving all web servers to Azure Web Apps.
Next, BUI will help the firm to transition to running Microsoft SQL as a service rather than a VM.
And finally, BUI and TravelIT will together embark upon migrating the Microsoft Biztalk application to Logic and Function Apps.