All Nippon Airways is staring down a problem most airlines will eventually face: a projected tenfold jump in data volumes across reservations, boarding, customer communications, and everything else that keeps roughly 280 aircraft running on time. Rather than expand its existing network piece by piece, Japan’s largest airline rebuilt its cloud connectivity around Equinix Fabric, a software-defined platform, and cut network provisioning time by about 80% in the process.
That speed matters more than it might sound, especially as ANA leans further into hybrid and multicloud operations. The airline operates over 200 domestic and international routes, and every system behind those routes, from passenger booking to real-time operational coordination, now depends on cloud infrastructure that can scale without months of setup work. ANA’s old approach relied on dedicated circuits for individual systems, which worked fine until connectivity needs kept multiplying across multiple cloud providers and the whole thing became expensive and slow to grow.
ANA solved that by pulling everything into a centralized cloud network hub, which now gives the airline on-demand, secure connections to AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud without spinning up new physical circuits every time something changes. Jun Nakazato, who oversees IT infrastructure within ANA’s Digital Transformation Division, put it plainly: the airline’s expansion outgrew what the old network could handle, and a cloud-native network-as-a-service model turned out to be the more practical path forward than continuing to build out what already existed.
The payoff extends beyond just speed. ANA is targeting a 30% cut to its five-year total cost of ownership, and faster cloud provisioning means application development and testing teams get resources without the usual wait. That agility also sets ANA up for whatever comes next in its cloud strategy, whether that’s more advanced analytics, automation, or AI-driven passenger services running across its multicloud environment.
Kuniko Ogawa, Equinix’s Managing Director for Japan, framed ANA’s approach as a model for how large enterprises can modernize their cloud connectivity without a full infrastructure overhaul, layering flexibility on top of what’s already there rather than ripping it out and starting over.
For an airline managing that much complexity across that many routes and cloud providers, the real test now is whether the new architecture holds up as data volumes actually climb toward that projected tenfold increase.
