Dublin Airport Authority (DAA plc.)

DAA plc. is the airport management company for Dublin, Cork & Shannon 
Airports in Ireland. In 2010, they released a highly competitive tender with stringent public procurement guidelines for an external IT company to deliver a range of services and technologies to underpin and enhance DAA’s Internet and Intranet environment.

“After a highly competitive tender process, we chose TelecityGroup as they offered an unrivalled service.  We are committed to providing our customers with the highest level of service at all times, and are confident that TelecityGroup can help us reach and exceed our customers’ expectations.”

Gerry Luttrell,
Head of IT & Shared Services, DAA

 

The Brief

The overall scope of the Project had three distinct areas. To:

• Support and develop the DAA internet and intranet presence
  
• Host all DAA websites in a secure, PCI Compliant environment
  
• Provide secure and resilient connectivity for DAA’s online presence
  

There were two major milestones that were behind this tender: Firstly, the iconic, brand new T2 terminal was due to open in November 2010 and secondly a new revenue-generating, online shopping website www.theloop.ie was due to launch at this time, the first of its kind in Ireland. DAA’s online presence was the focal point of this project. The internet provides DAA with the primary method of communicating with clients. The usability and speed of their websites, hosted in a low  risk computing environment, with a technology platform and associated infrastructure to meet both the day-to-day needs and the strategic imperatives for DAA’s business requirements for the next 3 to 6 years were the key elements of this project. The key solution provided to DAA was a fully PCI compliant hosting environment A huge component of the project was the security of payments through DAA’s websites. All four DAA airport websites securely process card payment information online. As a result, it is mandatory that the hosting environments comply fully with the stringent worldwide Payment  Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard. PCI is a standard developed to help organisations that process card payments fight the threat of credit card fraud and specifies that the IT environment which stores customer data is secure and free from external threats.) TelecityGroup comply with PCI through securely hosting DAA’s Internet server environment in a PCI compliant environment within their Kilcarbery Park data centre, whilst providing resilient connectivity between the TelecityGroup state-of-the-art data centre and Dublin Airport.

Support Services

TelecityGroup manage and monitor all applications associated with the project. In addition, TelecityGroup manages operating systems and perform system administration tasks of ‘in-scope’ servers in line with PCI DSS policies. Host intrusion detection and configuration managed software was installed and configured on the servers.

Data storage

DAA avail of TelecityGroup “SAN on Demand” service across two geographically diverse data centres. This service allows DAA dedicated data storage on an enterprise-class Hitachi SAN without the need to purchase, license, maintain and manage, which was a huge cost-saving for DAA. The TelecityGroup engineering team wholly manage this storage solution, reducing costs and administration for DAA.

Resilient Connectivity

TelecityGroup provides DAA with resilient MESH Connectivity, which deploys four independent carriers to ensure complete redundancy within the network architecture.

Online Security

TelecityGroup takes full responsibility for online security: installing and monitoring inside and outside firewalls and web application firewalling. Given the critical nature of DAA’s online presence, it is important to increase security layers above traditional firewalls, so web applications are fully protected from known, and unknown, vulnerabilities. DAA also benefit from Denial of Service (DoS) mitigation service, which is essential for any mission critical website.

Virtualisation

Every single operating system is run on a fully virtualised, VMware environment. This allows a reduced number of physical servers, meaning less power, less administration and less licensing. Overall, this project showcased how the business needs of an organisation become aligned with the goals of IT. From a revenue generating new online channel to simply developing an easier way to communicate with customers, IT is at the very core of this. TelecityGroup is the provider that helps DAA in their journey to achieve this goal. Gerry Luttrell, Head of IT & Shared Services at DAA, “After a highly competitive tender process, we chose TelecityGroup as they offered an unrivalled service. We are committed to providing our customers with the highest level of service at all times, and are confident that TelecityGroup can help us reach and exceed our customers’ expectations.” Maurice Mortell, Managing Director of TelecityGroup Ireland, concluded, “We are delighted to work with DAA on this project, which enables us to demonstrate our core ability: to deliver a wide range of services and technologies that enhance and simplify our clients IT infrastructure. The DAA project is the perfect example of our continued success in this field thanks to our dedicated and hardworking team of experts.”

• Printable Version
• Email a friend