Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd. Transforms Shore-Side Operations with Amazon Web Services
Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd. (NYSE: NCLH) (“NCLH” or the “Company”), today announced the successful migration of its shoreside technology infrastructure, including its reservation system, mobile apps, among others to Amazon Web Services (AWS). This strategic move makes NCLH one of the first passenger cruise lines to transition its core technology operations to AWS. The Company is using AWS’s proven, secure, and highly performant infrastructure to reduce average processing time, increase availability during peak periods, streamline its operational infrastructure, and enhance the overall cruising experience.
"We are thrilled to be at the forefront of cloud adoption in the cruise industry,” said Georgios Mortakis, NCLH chief information officer and chief information security officer. "Our migration of on-premises workloads to AWS has resulted in significant improvements in performance. This allows us to accelerate innovation and create amazing experiences for our employees, guests, and travel partners. As an example, during our largest traffic event ever for our reservations systems in November 2023, we handled record volumes without any known performance or availability issues."
The 15-month migration to AWS, led by Mortakis and Humberto Pombo, senior director of Infrastructure at NCLH, involved moving over 100 applications, thousands of virtual and physical servers, data center environments, and peripheral server rooms to the cloud. NCLH worked with AWS, which offered guidance and operational best practices with automations, skills, and experience to move outdated legacy systems to a modernized tech stack, bolstering availability, performance, and faster application response times during Wave seasons and high-demand promotional events. NCLH can now respond swiftly to market changes, customer expectations, and disruption. Disaster recovery is now much more seamless through the use of multiple AWS Availability Zones and Regions for mission-critical applications. The Company has also adopted development, security and operations, or “DevSecOps”, into its software development processes. DevSecOps brings new tools and processes that makes security an integral part of the software development process. This framework facilitates secure coding practices, automates security testing procedures, and mitigates human errors that could potentially expose vulnerabilities.
NCLH’s determined journey to complete the AWS migration within a tight 15-month timeframe wasn’t without roadblocks and dependencies. “Meticulous planning by the implementation team, leveraging cutting-edge technologies and innovative strategies to streamline the migration process, and an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ attitude were necessary”, Mortakis stated.
With its shore-side migration complete, NCLH is eager to harness the full potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize its operations. The Company plans to leverage a broad portfolio of AWS analytics, machine learning, and generative AI services to facilitate rapid prototyping of new features and services. From tailoring onboard activities and amenities to individual preferences to streamlining logistics and supply chain management, AI-driven insights will enable NCLH to elevate the cruise experience.
“By being an all-in cloud adopter, NCLH is a digital transformer ready to capitalize on the agility, scalability, and innovation the cloud unlocks” said Steven M. Elinson, director, services sector at AWS. “We are excited to expand our collaboration with NCLH as it embarks on this next chapter of cloud-enabled innovation.”
About Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd.
Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd. (NYSE: NCLH) is a leading global cruise company that operates Norwegian Cruise Line, Oceania Cruises and Regent Seven Seas Cruises®. With a combined fleet of 32 ships and approximately 66,500 berths, NCLH offers itineraries to approximately 700 destinations worldwide. NCLH expects to add 13 additional ships across its three brands through 2036, which will add approximately 41,000 berths to its fleet. To learn more, visit www.nclhltd.com.
Cautionary Statement Concerning Forward-Looking Statements
Some of the statements, estimates or projections contained in this release are “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the U.S. federal securities laws intended to qualify for the safe harbor from liability established by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements other than statements of historical facts contained in this release, including, without limitation, NCLH’s expectations regarding its expected uses of technology or artificial intelligence, expected performance of its technology and technology infrastructure and expected fleet additions, including expected timing thereof, may be forward-looking statements. Many, but not all, of these statements can be found by looking for words like “expect,” “anticipate,” “goal,” “project,” “plan,” “believe,” “seek,” “will,” “may,” “intend,” “future” and similar words. Forward-looking statements do not guarantee future performance and may involve risks, uncertainties and other factors which could cause our actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from the future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied in those forward-looking statements. Examples of these risks, uncertainties and other factors include, but are not limited to the risk factors set forth under “Risk Factors” in NCLH’s most recently filed Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The above examples are not exhaustive and new risks emerge from time to time. There may be additional risks that NCLH considers immaterial or which are unknown. Such forward-looking statements are based on NCLH’s current beliefs, assumptions, expectations, estimates and projections regarding its present and future business strategies and the environment in which it expects to operate in the future. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date made. NCLH expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statement to reflect any change in its expectations with regard thereto or any change of events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement was based, except as required by law.
Released June 4, 2024
