Eastern Airlines LLC (Eastern) operates scheduled domestic and international passenger and cargo flights out of the United States.
Customer Challenge
Eastern Airlines was undergoing a revival. They had recently moved their offices from North Carolina to the Philadelphia area and were growing their fleet as well as their staffing. From an IT perspective, they needed to move beyond start-up mode. It was time to implement enterprise grade IT to support an airline environment – with mission critical applications to support their growth.
Eastern’s Senior Director of Information Services at the time, Robert Pope, knew he needed external support to build the company’s IT infrastructure. Having already worked with CrucialLogics on a large United Way project and others, he “had the highest level of confidence that the CrucialLogics team could deliver exactly what Eastern needed.”
Solution
CrucialLogics conducted a complete assessment of Eastern’s IT environment. They built topography diagrams of the company’s infrastructure, assessed their desktop and networking environments, and developed a comprehensive roadmap and priorities.
Growing an airline in the economic climate of a pandemic is no simple task. Pope hired CrucialLogics for their “expertise, ongoing advice and consultation, and especially for their flexibility with the company’s evolving needs and priorities.” To accommodate the airline’s budget, CrucialLogics broke down the project into affordable chunks for implementation.
Results
First on Eastern’s priority list was security support. The airline was applying for the US Department of Defense’s CRAF (Civil Reserve Air Fleet) program, which is civilian aircraft backup for the military. Eastern had only 39 days to improve their security posture and complete a NIST 800- 171 self-assessment. CrucialLogics completed the project a day early and helped the airline successfully achieve acceptance into the program.
While moving the organization towards enterprise-grade IT, Eastern engaged CrucialLogics’ HyperCare help desk services. In addition to providing a help desk, including a ticket-tracking system and dedicated toll-free phone line, CrucialLogics also completed several housekeeping projects on the Microsoft Office 365 environment, such as email account cleanup and the implementation of ATP (Advance Threat Protection) and MFA (Multi Factor Authentication). Pope comments, “I would highly recommend HyperCare services to other potential customers. In fact, I have.”
CrucialLogics also helped the airline with their data governance and business intelligence, leveraging the integrated capabilities of Microsoft Power BI and SQL Server, and spooling the database to Azure Storage. Pope notes that, “We needed CrucialLogics’ expertise for this side project, so we asked them to put a proposal together, and the project is still currently in play.”
From implementing mission-critical applications to improving Eastern’s security posture and data management, the airline relied on CrucialLogics to build their enterprise-grade infrastructure in the Microsoft environment. Pope commented, “The high-quality work that they do, as well as the upfront consultations to make sure that every solution is the right fit, those are the main strengths of CrucialLogics.”
I have used CrucialLogics in the past and I’ll use them in the future. As an IT leader you really need to have the right vendor partner on your side, and I trust
CrucialLogics and what they can do.”
Robert Pope, Senior Director of Information Services, Eastern Airlines
