After serving 9 million passengers in 2019, Queen Alia International Airport in Amman expected a busy 2020, hosting an increasing number of travelers and moving ahead with plans to modernize its infrastructure. Then the pandemic hit.
The airport had been making steady progress on plans to complete the first phase of a digital transformation of the airport's IT infrastructure, migrating services and applications to a cloud architecture, when the spread of COVID-19 forced restrictions on travel, grounding flights worldwide.
As early as May, the Airports Council International (ACI) trade associations estimated that in 2020, passenger traffic worldwide would amount to less than half of what was previously projected for the year. A nationwide curfew in Jordan, meanwhile, threatened to disrupt the IT upgrade project at the Queen Alia airport (QAIA).
With a COVID-9 lockdown causing a move to remote work, QAIA deployed desktop-as a-service (DaaS) technology to train its dispersed staff and complete the IT migration