Case Study: Malaysia Airlines Berhad achieves 45% lower IT costs and faster innovation with Microsoft Azure

At Malaysia Airlines, innovation's up and costs are down, because the company has more than its planes in the cloud

Malaysia Airlines, the national carrier of Malaysia, faced a competitive industry backdrop and aging infrastructure—its 10-module SAP system ran on end-of-life IBM AIX and DB2 hardware/software—so the company needed to cut operating costs, reduce vendor lock-in, and accelerate digital innovation. Working with Tata Consultancy Services, Malaysia Airlines set out to modernize its IT estate and improve customer engagement while preserving regulatory and legacy requirements.

The airline adopted a hybrid-cloud strategy on Microsoft Azure, migrating most systems (including SAP) to Windows Server 2016 and SQL Server 2016 in Azure within six months, replatforming AIX workloads to Linux, and connecting environments via Azure ExpressRoute. The move delivered pay-as-you-go scalability, faster time-to-market and unified management across cloud and private sites—reducing total annual costs (including maintenance and depreciation) by about 45%—and positioned the airline to pursue Azure Cognitive Services and Machine Learning for future customer-facing innovation.

Malaysia Airlines Berhad

Tan Kok Meng

Chief Information Officer